100% right.
It doesn’t make any sense without reprocessing though, have to do both. Fortunately France and Finland have active programs.
The US needs to both learn how to do reprocessing again and build more plants.
France program is still on a crisis due to maintenance and drought
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Crisis_since_late_2021
The maintenance crisis is under control, it will not be worse than past year.
Under control ? EDF Debt is around 100 billions, disponibility is around 58% and electricity price took +25% since two years…
EDF have been in debt for a very long time, they’ve been bought back by the state to restart a new plant generation. Disponibility has been worse and it was uncertain as the new maintenance issue was inspected everywhere. Now the global analysis is done and the maintenance has been aligned with the prediction for months, which calmed the market. Electricity price increase is multi-factorial: post COVID restart, war in Ukraine and new nuclear maintenance issue. It’s still under the effect of all of that and it will take a couple more years to come back to the previous situation, though still higher prices due to normal inflation and progressive carbon pricing.
If you’re worried about price variations, more renewable will make that worse. There are big variations of daily prices on the European market depending on wind in the North for example. Although thanks to the connected system, we can benefit from the right conditions from multiple parts of the continent.
I wonder what Greta’s take on nuclear is.
She’s probably going nuclear on Greenpeace.
Greta is very scientifically minded and rational, unlike how the media likes to portray her. They use the emotional sound bites and almost never show her referring to paper after paper.
I hate it that sometimes women are portrayed like that just because they’re women.
Me to, but in this case, I think it’s because of politics.
Neurotic men projecting their bullshit into other people.
Even if media agencies are not setting out to portray someone like a caraciture they can not help it. That is just how the media is organized nowadays. If Greta shouts something angry in a microphone and they have 7 seconds for a segment about her, then they will use that outburst.
That’s great to hear. 😊
The same as the experts she regularly refers to.
So in favour of nuclear as long as we are in the process of switching to renewables.
Which means she opposes what Ia Anstoot is saying. Thunberg does not view nuclear as a renewable in and of itself, and thus, like Greenpeace, she opposes EU Commission’s decision to include nuclear power in its classification system for sustainable finance (link).
Lets not trade in polluting the air with polluting the ground and water even more.
I don’t think we should shutter existing nuclear plants, but renewables are a better idea than new nuclear plants
I’m all for new nuclear but we have to become more mature about waste management - and until then, no, keep the remaining units running, but focus all other effort into renweables.
Renewables generate more toxic waste per mWh than any nuclear reactor design.
Your statement is specious at best and you need a full breakdown spelling out how you expect me to believe it with citations and evidence.
The Union of Concerned Scientists disagree, stating:
Despite these environmental impacts, renewable energy technologies compare extremely favorably to fossil fuels, and remain a core part of the solution to climate change.
Think it over: renewables produce industrial construction waste - carbon fiber, aluminum, composites etc., ONCE. during construction and erection (hehe). Then they run for decades. At the end of their lifecycle, especially for solar, there’s already tremendous effort going into recycling.
Your nuclear reactor is producing it 24/7/365 every day it’s in operation, for decades hopefully. But it also requires thousands of tons of concrete (huge emissions creator), a water supply that won’t ever be interrupted, and hardening against terrorist attack etc. Represents a shitton of material costs alone, before you get to processed fuel rods.
https://www.oneearth.org/the-7-reasons-why-nuclear-energy-is-not-the-answer-to-solve-climate-change/
Retaining the investment already made makes sense; crashing a program of nuclear plant production to meet the need - no. The enormous amount of time and energy used to create these plants, and the humongous regulatory hurdles in the way, with STILL NO CLEAR PATH FOR THE HORRIFIC NUCLEAR WASTE THEY PRODUCE, don’t justify it.
Finally, consider lifetime operational safety in a wildly changing climate: are we going to have more wildfires and hurricanes in the future? YES. Which is better to burn or tsunami - a coastal nuclear power station, or a wind farm? Drought is going to become a constant thing. How many wind farms melt down without water? Try that with a steam powered nuclear station.
I’m sure that there is some use for the waste, like it can be recycled.
tiny, teeny fractions of it have been experimented with, both for re-enrichment and also as raw fuel for other reactor types. No one’s running a waste-powered reactor atm.
"Approximately 97% – the vast majority (~94%) being uranium – of it could be used as fuel in certain types of reactor. "
could be. after processing that itself results in waste. and note that other caveat - in certain types of reactor. as in reactors specifically configured to run on recycled fuel. this is not the panacea you assume.
I didn’t assume anything, and I didn’t say it was perfect. I’ve just read up on it and said it’s a possibility. If that 97% turns out to be accurate, that’s good. Hugely better than coal or gas, and makes it a possible alternative to other green energy production methods. Which also arent perfect.
I’ve spent a lot of time around the nuclear industry. I think it’s better baseband power than fossil fuels. if I could flip a switch tomorrow and all the plants that had been built through the 90s were still going, sure, I’d love that route. Too many of those are gone. But thankfully solar and wind have become so ridiculously cheap at scale and deployable ready that arguing for a new investment in nuclear plants is hard to justify, especially conventional steam powered setups we’ve become used to. Bring in SMRs, but know those smaller setups can serve less and still generate the same kind of waste. Bring on breeder reactors that can run off other reactor’s waste output! But again know there will be radioisotope waste in some part of the pipeline. Molten salt closed loop setups for sure. But at six billion plus per unit, no, build solar and wind on gigantic scales please. Refurb and keep the old plants running, but don’t pursue a large nuclear component moving forward.
YMMV. We’ll need everyone to work together if we’re going to get our asses out of this shit. World wide, and coordinated.
lol looks like the right wingers finally got the one-world government they always feared… if they had only listened to Al Gore lol…
Actually that was really well written. Cheers.
One question though, something else I keep reading is that the blades for wind power can’t be recycled. Is this just bollocks being pushed by people that want nuclear power?
Also, cheers for not dragging me, which it seems you could have.
Nuclear still has a much smaller footprint for power generation than renewables, at least solar and wind. I think “engineered safe” micro reactors can still play a part but as others have said those have been “20 years out” like Fusion for decades.
Solar can co-exist in the same space as other activities. It can exist in the same space at sheep in fields. It can exist atop rivers. Wind can exist out in the ocean. Those spaces are not available to Nuclear and some of those effectively take up no new space at all.
I think we should do whatever decarbonizes us faster
Absolutely
That’s a great plan to never actually decarbonize
do not let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough”
edit: quick addendum, I really cannot stress this enough, everyone who says nuclear is an imperfect solution and just kicks the can down the road – yes, it does, it kicks it a couple thousand years away as opposed to within the next hundred years. We can use all that time to perfect solar and wind, but unless we get really lucky and get everyone on board with solar and wind right now, the next best thing we can hope for is more time.
I completely agree with everything you said except for ONE little thing:
You are grossly misrepresenting how far that can is kicked down, for the worse. It doesn’t kick it down a couple thousand years, it kicks it down for if DOZENS of millennia assuming we stay at the current energy capacity. Even if we doubled or tripled it, it would still be dozens of millennia. First we could use the uranium, then when that is gone, we could use thorium and breed it with plutonium, which would last an incomprehensibly longer time than the uranium did. By that point, we could hopefully have figured out fusion and supplement that with renewable sources of energy.
The only issue that would stem from this would be having TOO much energy, which itself would create a new problem which is heat from electrical usage.
To those of you who propose 100% renewables + storage. In cases with no access to hydro power. How much energy storage do you need? How does it scale with production/consumption? What about a system with 100TWh yearly production/consumption?
Interesting product. Reading about it quickly it seems to have a problem with self discharge. But perhaps they have ironed out that problem. There is no shortage of promising battery news, but there seems to be a problem getting them to mass production. Hoping this one is different.
EVs with VTG. Problem solved. More importantly, energy production (solar plus wind) and storage (batteries) are completely decentralized, which is a huge security improvement for the grid. It amazes me that a platform that is decentralized doesn’t beat the drum for the same for energy production and storage.
Is there any more in-depth analysis to show how many EVs would be needed to make this feasible, how this would work with time of day use of power from commutes vs generation from solar power, how long the grid could stay powered this way, impact on consumers range, etc? I think the concept seems simple at first but would it actually be resiliant relying on just EV batteries? A cloudy week could see everyone run out of power, for example.
A single Tesla powerwall has 13.5kwh of usable energy. An average Tesla car has between 70-100kwh of usable energy. The average American home uses about 30kwh/day (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3). There are about 141 million houses in the US. There are 275 million personal and commercial vehicles in the US. So there would be plenty of capacity once you replace a significant chunk of those vehicles with EV.
Cloudy weeks don’t occur over large areas - if you look at solar or wind production over an entire county or state, for example, it varies very little (that’s also the advantage of using both sun and wind - when one is bad the other is typically good). So the solution to intermittency is mass adoption.
I live in a 1000 square foot two bedroom condo. When it gets below 20° f, which does a lot during the winter, I have to use the auxiliary heat on my heat pump unit.
That’s 7.5 kW.
So just to stay warm during the night, when solar stops working, I would need 3-5 Power Walls?
Nice to meet you MrFagtron An EV would be a much better investment than powerwalls but it’s hard to be specific on a case by case basis. Hope that helps MrFagtron.
Get a better heat pump that doesn’t need aux heat? I know Mitsu “hyper heat” minisplits advertise high efficiency to -10F.
Powerwalls are overpriced for their capacity. Grid storage operators pay ~$150/kwh for batteries, then I’d guess about the same for charging/inverter electronics. I also see EV West sells 3.5kwh Samsung batteries to average consumers for $700 (I’m sure they’re charging a large markup as well).
In regards to V2G. Tesla is not even supporting bi-directional charging at this point and it is just now starting to become a bit more common in newer models. It would be interesting to see more detailed example about this. You would also need to include the usage of industry and commercial which as far as I know together account for more than residential usage. How about availability in terms of SOC and being plugged in or not. I think this is a bit more difficult to solve than you are alluding to but I’m happy to be proved wrong.
This is a far easier problem and solution than building a nuclear reactor. And it’s utilizing something (EVs) that we need anyway so improved utilization of resources.
Tesla buys UK energy company (see below)
It’s worth noting other companies in the UK are offerings V2G tariffs so this isn’t innovation it’s keeping up with competitors. And teh UK has a lot of Wind so access to storage during peak demand or low wind days is becoming important already.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/12/elon-musk-tesla-electric-supplier-britain
Yeah at higher latitudes the energy consumption is highest when renewable production is lowest.
Solar yes but not wind.
On coldest days in jan and feb the wind production here is nearly zero.
I’m glad your fellow countrymen have already got this figured out. Finland is a world leader in bioenergy. https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/finland-energy#:~:text=Renewable Energy,system based on fossil fuels.
Doesn’t energy made out biomass (like wood-fuels) release a lot of CO2 as it’s still a carbon source?
Also, in the same article, nuclear energy seems to be pretty high up too (if not higher) and they’re building a new reactor, showing that it’s not one or the other, but a combination that’s probably the best.
Geothermal would work, but it is very expensive unless you have a large property or a decent sized pond.
It would still require power from other sources, but would dramatically reduce demand.
How do you generate energy during the winter? Are we going to run HVDC to the Sahara and connect them globally?
Finland has it figured out - see link below.
I am not sure when the narrative around nuclear power became nuclear energy vs renewables when it should be nuclear and renewables vs fossil fuels.
We need both nuclear and renewable energy where we try to use and develop renewables as much as possible while using nuclear energy to plug the gaps in the renewable energy supply
Nuclear energy can not be used to “plug gaps”. The power that it produces can not be varied very quickly. The goal should be to only have renewable in the end.
Solar panels aren’t truly renewable since they degrade over time and need to be replaced after around 20-30 years. Yes they can be recycled, but so can (and is) nuclear waste.
Everything has a cost and you can’t escape entropy.
Minimum warranty for good solar panels at 90% is 30 years , they will last 60 (no one knows exactly) albeit not as efficient.
This is true; nothing is sustainable at geological time scales. Human technological civilization even less so. Just look at how badly North Africa, the Middle East and China’s environment has been degraded through thousands of years of organic (!) farming. The Middle East used to have enormous cypress forests, and North Africa was full of wetlands where the Qattara Depression now resides.
Let’s not forget about nuclear fusion, which will be way more efficient and have less waste if we can figure it out!!!😉
What I meant by gaps was that nuclear can be used in areas where solar or wind is not feasible yet or in areas where solar or wind cannot fulfill the energy demands.
Also we have very good control over nuclear power generation. There are a variety of methods using which we can control the reaction rate of the fission process
Uhhhhh
Easy, by paying people to spread misinformation.
That’s the “how”. The other commenter was unsure about “when”.
A decade ago I’d agree with you. But given the amount of time needed to get a nuclear power plant online, if we tried to use nuclear to replace fossil fuels, it’ll probably be too late. Add to that the fact that the cost of wind and solar has dropped significantly and the fact we’d be trading dependency on resources from a group of unstable countries to a dependency on resources from another group of unstable countries, it just seems like nuclear just isn’t a very good option any more.
Of course there could be a tech change (like fusion) which alters this, but the days of fission are past. Keep the plants that are currently operational going, and if there’s construction near completion, then sure. But I feel like fission has become a bad option for new developments. Takes too long and there’s better solutions available that don’t depend on resources from other countries.
It’s going to take decades to decarbonize, the current Paris accord 2030 goal will not be met at all. Biden has set a target date for the US for 2050 to achieve net zero. That’s 37 years away.
Currently we’re going in the opposite direction:
“The Production Gap 2021 report states that world governments still plan to produce 110% more fossil fuels in 2030 (including 240% more coal, 57% more oil and 71% more gas) than the 1.5 degree limit.[118]”
People are talking about solving climate change as a sprint, but really it’s a marathon. In fact, we don’t even have the technology to fully decarbonize all sectors. It’s going to take an “all hands on deck” approach and yes, will cost trillions of $$$ to achieve.
I’m pretty doubtful that we will achieve net zero energy and zero carbon before the end of the century. The first 50% of emissions reductions will be the easiest of the low hanging fruit; each successive % reduction will be that much harder and more expensive to achieve.
Tying back to your comment, each nuke plant permanently displaces millions of tons of CO2 emissions per year.
Fusion is still decades away from being commercially viable, so while continued funding for RnD for it should be important, it still has a long way to go before we can even start making plans for power plants operating on it.
As for Nuclear having long set up time… that’s not a reason to not use it. That’s a reason to hammer out plans and start finding ideal sites for it to service high density and high demand areas as soon as possible. The other half of this coin is that activists and legislatures need to take a serious look at Nuclear Regulations and cut the things that are simply not needed. Nuclear continues to be a viable option in spite of the severe restrictions placed upon it, restrictions that no other form of energy production could even be viable much less profitable. If we equalized these limitations and restrictions, you can pretty much guarantee that Nuclear would suddenly become #1 choice and still maintain the highest safety rating per watt produced.
Solar, Wind and Nuclear all complement each other very well, with the downsides of each generation being easily offset by the other two forms of power generation. Wind and Solar take a lot of space to make farms that produce enough power to feed a large city, where as a nuclear plant can produce the same amount of power with considerably less space. And the two can be interwoven together, with most nuclear plants already having ‘no go’ areas or restricted zones around them that could easily be filled in with Solar and Wind.
Solar will give you a set amount of power each day the shines, varying throughout the year but works as a good baseline. Initiatives could be pushed to add rooftop solar to most homes, businesses and other buildings or infrastructure that people don’t need to walk across or stand upon, increasing the base line here in a relatively cheap and low cost way, though of course these panels do need to be cleaned regularly so just plastering them to the sides of skyscrapers isn’t quite as viable as people like to think it would be.
Nuclear is a very efficient form of power generation with variable output. While it is true that Nuclear plants need some time to vary their output, this isn’t nearly as big of deal as people make it out to be given the rate of power generation can be changed in a matter of minutes, not hours, and using historical data of power usage year over year and monitoring current conditions, a properly built and managed nuclear plant can easily adjust on a schedule to raise and lower it’s output ahead of rising and falling demands throughout the day. And using modern reactor designs, these advantages become more pronounced with faster reaction times in generation and more thorough use of fuel leaving considerably less waste.
And Wind power acts as a great back up and buffer for all other forms of power generation, in rural areas wind power can easily provide 100% of the power needs and more to rural and suburban communities, and when combined with other forms of power wind can easily and rapidly bring turbines online or shut them off to follow the demand of the power grid and bridge the gap during any anomalous spikes and valleys in usage. Wind turbines do take a lot of space per gigawatthour produced, but in rural areas with farming or livestock where lots of land isn’t really being used and developed for other reasons, wind turbines make sense, and with good a good power grid that can transmit power over hundreds of miles, can incorporate large areas of empty land into high density area in the same region to meet power needs with minimal pollution and carbon footprint.
Of course each power generation has it’s problems, Solar only works when the sun shines obviously, requiring large scale power storage which isn’t exactly feasible with the technology we have today. Wind turbines seem great on the surface, but their blades are made of carbon fibre in most instances, and have 7 year life spans at most, with no current programs or policies in place to break down these turbine blades that will not decay naturally, meaning roughly every seven years landfills and dumps get thousands more semi-trailer sized blades dumped into them with no long term plan on how to recycle or reuse them. And Nuclear power has the waste issue, and more importantly a PR issue. With older 60s and 70s designs, these reactors did generate notable amounts of waste, but this is less a problem with more modern reactors that can even run previously ‘depleted’ waste fuel through them to generate power while also reducing the amount of radioactive material left over. And of course the longer setup times, which addressed above is not actually something they should need, given the absurdly high standards placed upon Nuclear by skeptics and detractors decades ago mean many other power plants, factories and even government buildings would immediately be disqualified and turned into exclusion zones due the natural radioactivity of the building materials such as granite which we know to be harmless to humans.
Nuclear plus renewables is the path we need. Add in power storage technologies to smooth out fluctuations and we’re fully covered.
the fact we’d be trading dependency on resources from a group of unstable countries to a dependency on resources from another group of unstable countries
I’m not sure calling Canada (up until 2019 the largest exporter and miner of uranium) an unstable country. Unless you want to talk about our looming housing crash.
He is talking about Kazakhstan, which produces ~46% of the supply (compared to Canada’s ~15% of which they export even less). Other top producers includes Namibia and Uzbekistan, not terribly stable countries.
And on top of that, the Stans have a big neighbour that would be willing to conquer them to secure these resources, to strengthen its geopolitical position.
Also not sure what your source is for Canada being the largest exporter, as they have exported less than Kazakhstan since at least 2013 (according to what I can find, but please prove me wrong if that isn’t the case). They definitely weren’t the largest miner of it since 2009 I believe.
This is the product of a couple of cultural movements in previous generations.
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People who conflated their Cold War-era opposition to nuclear weapons with opposition to nuclear energy. The Venn diagram with early environmental movements has considerable overlap.
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A more general and mostly-irrational fear of nuclear energy mostly stoked in the U.S. by Three Mile Island, which is a case study in good nuclear accident management with piss-poor public relations. (See: the first few seasons of the Simpsons many gags about the dangers of the power plant.)
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The current environmental movement’s general unwillingness to acknowledge nuclear energy as a very advantageous tool in the push to eliminate fossil fuels. Why? Over-optimism about where renewables are now and continued influence of the Boomers from #1 who taught all of their university classes.
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Over-reaction to Fukushima, particularly in the EU (other than France). And then doubling down until Ukraine forced their hands when Russian gas became an embarrassment.
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Nuclear, the costliest energy source available with massive room for long build projects and years of service contracts to manage the waste materials and deconstruction costs with at least nine figures. Cui bono?
Wind and solar ia cheap and save, batteries work. Build time is manageable.
Pretending that the baseload problem is solved for solar and wind doesn’t help anybody. “batteries work”, but not at the scale of the demands of a power utility when wind and solar happen not to be producing.
New nuclear installations will take 10 years and more. They will cost more then anyone is willing to pay. The math is clear, batteries and renewables like geo heat pumps, solar and wind are dead cheap in comparison.
Energy conservation is still the main goal.
Nuclear energy is the false promises that let us believe we can continue as we were.
Cue the nuclear shills that will handwave away any legitimate concern with wishful thinking and frame the discussion as solely pro/anti fossil, conveniently pretending that renewables don’t exist.
ETA:
Let’s look at some great examples of handwaving and other nonsense to further the nuclear agenda.
Here @danielbln@lemmy.world brings up a legitimate concern about companies not adhering to regulation and regulators being corrupt/bought *cough… Three Mile Island cough*, and how to deal with that:
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?
So of course the answer to that by @Carighan@lemmy.world is a slippery slope argument and equating a hypothetical disaster with thousands if not millions of victims and areas being uninhabitable for years to come, with the death of a family member due to faulty wiring in your home:
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.
Then there’s the matter of misleading statistics and graphs.
Never mind the fact that the amount of victims of nuclear disasters is underreported, under-attributed and research is hampered if not outright blocked to further a nuclear agenda, also never mind that the risks are consistently underreported, lets leave those contentious points behind and look at what’s at hand.Here @JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works shows a graph from Our World in Data that is often thrown around and claims to show “Death rates by unit of electricity production”:
Seems shocking enough and I’m sure in rough lines, the proportions respective to one another make sense to some degree or another.
The problem however is that the source data is thrown together in such a way that it completely undermines the message the graph is trying to portray.According to Our World in Data this is the source of the data used in the graph:
Death rates from energy production is measured as the number of deaths by energy source per terawatt-hour (TWh) of electricity production.
Data on death rates from fossil fuels is sourced from Markandya, A., & Wilkinson, P. (2007).
Data on death rates from solar and wind is sourced from Sovacool et al. (2016) based on a database of accidents from these sources.
We estimate deaths rates for nuclear energy based on the latest death toll figures from Chernobyl and Fukushima as described in our article here: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima
We estimate death rates from hydropower based on an updated list of historical hydropower accidents, dating back to 1965, sourced primarily from the underlying database included in Sovacool et al. (2016). For more information, see our article: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Fossil fuel numbers are based on this paper which starts out by described a pro-nuclear stance, but more importantly, does a lot of educated guesstimating on the air-pollution related death numbers that is straight up copied into the graph.
Sovacool is used for solar and wind, but doesn’t have those estimates and is mainly limited to direct victims.
Nuclear based deaths is based on Our World in Data’s own nuclear propaganda piece that mainly focuses on direct deaths and severely underplays non-direct deaths.
And hydropower bases deaths is based on accidents.
So they mix and match all kinds of different forms of data to make this graph, which is a no-no. Either you stick to only accidents, only direct deaths or do all possible deaths that is possibly caused by an energy source, like they do for fossil fuels.
Not doing so makes the graph seem like some kind of joke.
Sounds like young activist has something to learn from these who have been fighting for climate for decades
If we’d ignored the FUD and gone nuclear 70 years ago climate change would be nothing more than an interesting “what if”. I guess Greenpeace won if their goal was to make it an imminent existential threat. Good job I guess.
If we’d gone with green energy 70 years ago climate change wouldn’t be nothing either, and we wouldn’t have to worry about nuclear power plants issues. Greenpeace has always been advocating for this
By fighting nuclear they were advocating against green energy.
Nuclear is not green
Why not?
And what would that lesson be? The people who fought nuclear for decades caused as much damage to the climate as the interim coal companies because that is who supplied the power instead.
And what would that lesson be?
If you are interested go to their website and read what they have to say about nuclear. Climate activists do not advocate for coal and most likely live in such a way that they cause less damage to the climate than the average person, including you.
You skipped over my point. I think the activists let perfection get in the way of progress. I know that they’re not advocating for coal, but by fighting nuclear they left no other scalable solution other than coal. Nuclear doesn’t have to be a forever solution, but it’s a perfect stop gap in the meantime.
Surely these activists contributed to progress on some other, smaller sources of renewable energy, but at the cost of decades of record breaking greenhouse gas emissions.
Nuclear could have put a halt to many if not most coal and natural gas plants until other sources of renewable energy improve and have time to get built out.
A perfect stop gap in the meantime is not a solution. Remember that coal as a piece of rock it’s not a problem, the problem is caused by society relying on burning coal to satisfy its frivolous consumes. The climate crisis is not caused by activists fighting against it. Renewables could have put a halt to polluting energy the same way you claim nuclear would have, with the difference that it would have been even better because nuclear comes with other issues.
I agree with that, and I’m glad to see true clean renewables becoming a larger percentage of our energy use, but it has just been disappointingly slow.
Meh, nuclear isn’t anti-climate but anti-environment (not only waste but the production too).
Meh … so the nuclear lobby astroturfing campaigns we know from reddit have arrived on lemmy now. That we have to decide between coal or nuclear is propaganda. Nuclear is an old fashioned concept just like coal - decentralized renewables are the future - fuck the nuclear lobby and their feeble lies!
Do you have a source for your fear that this is effective for the nuclear lobby? I am in the US, I’m so unaware of a nuclear lobby.
Your government to begin with. A centralized energy source nobody else can deploy is a big leverage on people and yet another tool to control them
When she can tell me a practical, long-term, solution to nuclear waste, demonstrate that a nuclear bomb is not a military target, sure.
We just saw Japan release nuclear waste into the ocean for lack of a solution (to the waste from a fucking nuclear disaster) , don’t tell me it’s not a problem.
Yes I know coal emits radioactive waste, I’m not a coal advocate.
practical, long-term, solution to nuclear waste
This depends on the type of waste, and how radioactive it is. The overwhelming majority of nuclear waste is low level, and capable of being safely stored in steel/concrete casks. The higher level stuff can be safely stored in exhausted mines.
demonstrate that a nuclear bomb is not a military target, sure
All power sources are inherently military targets, so you’ve defined an impossible task.
Additionally, you can design a plant to be a lower risk target in the case of an attack. We’ve had decades of research put into how to make these plants safe.
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/homesec/RL34331.pdf
https://theconversation.com/how-to-protect-nuclear-plants-from-terrorists-57094
We just saw Japan release nuclear waste into the ocean for lack of a solution
I’m not thrilled with it either, but the waste they are releasing is diluted.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66610977
The water they are releasing is basically no different than the radioactivity of normal sea water.
The solution to pollution is dilution! right!?
In the case of radioactive water, yes. Our oceans are huge, and there is no real impact.
This is what humans have been saying about auto exhaust, factory emissions, agricultural emissions etc for a hundred years. It’s turned out wrong in every way.
(edit) Now that I think about it, isn’t your position basically the same as the right wing position on climate change? That even if it exists humans are too small to actually effect the huge atmosphere so it’s not human caused.
“The amount of X that industry is dumping into the Y is insignificant and nothing to be concerned about” is an inherently flawed argument, and all the worse when there are 8 billion people on the planet.
This is what humans have been saying about auto exhaust, factory emissions, agricultural emissions etc for a hundred years. It’s turned out wrong in every way.
There is a key difference, fossil fuel use inherently ends up leaving pollution in the atmosphere, nuclear power does not do anything of the same.
it, isn’t your position basically the same as the right wing position on climate change?
Nope. It’s not even close
That even if it exists humans are too small to actually effect the huge atmosphere so it’s not human caused.
That’s not even close to what I am saying.
All sea water is radioactive already, and has been since before humans got nukes. And thats because all sea water has tritium at low levels. When we release water that is at the same level as sea water, nothing changes.
It’s like adding a red ball or playdoh to a red ball of playdoh. There’s not going to be a difference. Fossil fuels on the other hand would be like adding a black ball of playdoh to a red one.
I find it fascinating how few people remember the time when Greenpeace was literally selling Russian gas.
Reminds me of PETA throwing lobsters in fresh water.
From the Wikipedia Page
In “Climate and Energy”
Green Planet Energy
In 1999 Greenpeace Germany (NGO) founded Greenpeace Energy, a renewable electricity cooperative that supplied customers with fossil gas starting from 2011. After a 2021 media outcry about an entity associated with Greenpeace selling fossil fuel which has been described as greenwashing,[89] the cooperative changed its name to Green Planet Energy.[90] The Greenpeace Germany NGO retains one share in the cooperative, which has been criticized for “greenwashing” Russian gas.[89]
Link to article 89 Link to article 90
I am Kyoyeou, just a curious person. Not Bip Boop
Could you expand on that please? (I sound a bit snarky but don’t mean to!)
I’ve made a comment to the parent one with a link to the wiki article!
@Kyoyeou@slrpnk.net seems to have given all the background info :)
I made it in response to this comment but wanted it to be a bit less hidden!
Why go nuclear when renewable is so much cheaper, safer, future proof and less centralised?
Don’t get me wrong. Nuclear is better than coal and gas but it will not safe our way of life.
Just like the electric car is here to preserve the car industry not the planet, nuclear energy is still here to preserve the gib energy players, not our environment.
If renewables are an option you should definitely go for them, but we as a species are pretty much at manufacturing capacity for them. That capacity is being increased, but for now it makes sense to do nuclear in parallel.
Renewables also have the issue of storage, and not all locations are as suitable for wind or solar.
There are cases where nuclear makes more sense, and especially in the short term we need anything that will get us away from fossil fuels.
You could build an entirely new solar, wind, and battery supply chain from the mines to the factories in a quarter of the time it takes to build a single nuclear plant.
A big problem with solar and wind is that they are not as reliable as nuclear. In a worst-kaas scenario neither will produce energy because there is no sun or wind and there is no way to store enough electricity for these moments. Therefore we need a constant source that creates electricity for those moments. Of course, we do also need renewables, but nuclear is essential because it is reliable.
So it’s more nuclear vs renewables and a ton of batteries. (Or other storage options)
What it really should be is nuclear plus renewables plus a ton of batteries (or other storage options) vs fossil fuels.
For what I’ve read, it’s beats nuclear tech exists and is ready to be built at scale now. Renewables are intermittent in nature and need energy storage to work at scale. We don’t have the tech for a grid wide energy storage.
Because it gets dark and the wind stops blowing and industry still operates when those things happen. Nuclear is not a forever solution, but a necessary stop-gap.
It’s not actually required at all though, thats all FUD from the big energy monopoly that hate anything that can be owned and run by people that aren’t them - there are endless options for making a stable grid using renewables and they’re all considerably cheaper, quicker to make and a lot more resilient.
Nuclear gets pushed so hard because it protects the billionaires monopoly that’s the only reason.
What are you talking about? Nuclear has been the target of a massive misinformation campaign from the fossil fuel corporations for decades. Looks like you’ve fallen for the FUD. People have been formatted by literally every form of media to think of nuclear as something dirty, dumping green glowing waste into the environment, and making fish grow extra heads.
Countries like Germany have been closing perfectly fine NPPs because of FUD funded by their huge fossil fuel lobby. 80% of our energy is from fossils, and they have apparently successfully convinced people that we shouldn’t attack that number with every tool at our disposal. Meanwhile, we’re collectively spending literally trillions of dollars on fossil fuel subsidies every year. Is that what pushing nuclear hard looks like?
You accuse me of falling for FUD, I accuse you of falling for FUD - you say the reason it’s so unpopular is because everyone else is wrong, I say it’s so popular because everyone else is wrong…
Germany has been very concerned about nuclear since a reactor exploded and they lived thorough the drama of having a cloud of nuclear fallout drift over them, i remember it and it was scary. Interesting France loves nuclear and this didn’t happen in France, the French government lied and said they didn’t detect any radiation because they didn’t want to pay for leukaemia treatment and etc – what I’m getting at is it’s super complex why some people love nuclear and some hate it. When a second major nuclear disaster hit the planet it bulstered German distrust in the tech, it’s not some sinister plot.
The facts remain billionaires make huge sums from oil and are already invested, that’s why they fight to keep it - they know they’ll lose their monopoly when we move away from it if we go to something normal companies and towns can run so their favourite alternative is the only other option that allows them to have a monopoly.
Oil and gas subsidy are bad for sure, you’re kidding of you think the nuclear industry doesn’t get absolutely huge amounts of public money thrown at it - look at Hinckley point C for example, the British government locked in an absurdly high price per mwh so EDF would get paid about double the current market rate - and this isn’t rare, all over the world tax payers are funding nuclear subsidiaries because the plants aren’t economically viable
And when the men in radiation suits came round collecting bird poop because the local reactor was leaking that’s also paid for by the tax payers - it happened twice that I’ve known of. That’s before you even think about how much tax money was spent on development and related costs, fuel sourcing, etc…
The wind industry has had mild government support, solar even less - except in Germany where it’s been incredibly effective in enabling rooftop solar and grid modernization. Yet they’ve been building solar farms near me a lot recently because small private investors are able to actually see a return on their investments - since they started taking about building a replacement nuclear plant dozens of renewable sites have been put in the area, all now generating and some already paid off and making profit.
Nuclear was amazing in the fifties and it still has some limited use cases but it’s basically obsolete as more modern technologies have emerged - and are continuing to emerge, they’re starting to put in tidal systems and biomass conversion facilities (which are actually carbon negative) with huge developments underway in solar panel development, if the same investment had been made in solar and chemistry as has been with nuclear then there wouldn’t be any of the fuel crisis going on.
Seriously go look at the history of nuclear power research and development, government money and billionaire energy conglomerate money gets poured into it at every step and it’s endlessly pushed as the next big thing… Then look at the developments in things like solar panels and algae to fuel chemistry - that’s all major breakthroughs by chem nerds who used their moms old tuppawear to cultivate strains because they’d already spent the research budget on a bus ride to the local park to scoop algae from the pond.
Nuclear subidies aren’t even in the same order of magnitude as fossil fuel subsidies. There’s so much fearmongering in that comment I don’t even know where to start… Chernobyl really was the best thing to happen to the fossil fuel lobby.
go look at the history of nuclear power research and development
My friend, I went to university for this shit.
I can’t imagine a future without solar, wind, and nuclear power.
not unless we find out we are wrong about thermodynamics.
You don’t need to imagine a future without nuclear in the mix - there are plenty of places doing fine with renewables and without coal or nuclear right now.
which country?
For example South Australia - no coal since 2016, no nuclear ever, runs mostly on a mix of renewables - solar and wind with batteries and transient gas for in-fill.
Edit: thanks to whoever downvoted my verified statement of fact (see below)
never heard of that country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_stations_in_Australia?wprov=sfla1
Weird argument. “It’s a place bigger than a bunch of EU countries put together but it’s not a country so I’m going to use other places that aren’t South Australia to counter your point which was about South Australia”
lol im not playing this shell game.
Wind and Solar are “renewable” to a certain scale. If you dump gigantic wind farm in the middle of a jet stream, for example, you can impact downstream climate cycles.
that’s why we could be aware of all the externalities.
solar could be deployed on the ocean but that will certainly lower sea temperatures.
let’s terraform intentionally rather than just accidentally.
We can and should be doing both. Use the money our governments are giving to fossil fuels in subsidies. $7 trillion PER YEAR (that’s 11 million every minute) in public subsidies go to fossil fuels. Channel that to nuclear and renewables and there’s more than enough to decarbonise the grids with both short- and long-term solutions.
What we definitely should not be doing is closing perfectly working nuclear power plants.
Yeah, the cost is the real downside to Nuclear. However, for every Nuclear plant running, that’s a lot of batteries it other energy storage that don’t have to be built today in order to have clean energy. Because even if we were utilizing nuclear like we should, we would still need to be building a shit ton of batteries to keep the cost of energy coming down.
The cost of electricity dropping is bad news for nuclear power plants because they’ll be even less profitable when they’re finished. Especially since they take decades to construct, during which time renewables and storage become even cheaper.
And we’ll still need a way to store power from renewables when they overproduce.
Don’t forget nuclear waste that is just building up forever with nothing to do with it.
Do you know how much nuclear waste has been produced in the whole world for the entire history of nuclear energy production?
Around 500 000 tonnes.
That’s 0.001% of the waste thrown into the atmosphere by fossil fuels EVERY YEAR.
It’s the only kind of waste that goes away on it’s own if you literally sit on it and do nothing
Renewable instead of nuclear, but nuclear instead of coal.
We need a mix. Centralization isn’t the biggest problem. Literally anything we can do to reduce emissions is worth doing, and we won’t be going 100% on anything, so best to get started on the long term projects now so that we can stop turning on new plants based on combustion.
Even if it takes 2 decades to get a new plant going, it’s a nuclear plant’s worth of fossil fuels we don’t need any more, and therefore worth doing.
If it isn’t fossil fuels, it’s automatically better.
The main problem with nuclear power plants isn’t the radiation or the waste or the risk of accident. It’s that they cost so damn much they’re rarely profitable, especially in open electricity markets. 70-80% of the cost of the electricity is building the plant, and without low interest rates and a guaranteed rate when finished it doesn’t make economic sense to build them.
The latest nuclear plant in the US is in Georgia and is $17 billion over budget and seven years later than expected.
Isn’t a lot of that due to organization structures in US power Markets? I remember reading that a lot of times costs on electrical power go nuts due to near fraudulent managers.
Nuclear plants are immensely profitable, just not on time scales politicians are interested in. You’re deep in the red for 10-20 years and then after that it prints money
So after 10-20 years of construction and cost overruns and 10-20 years of operating at a loss you start making money.
And that’s assuming electricity rates don’t drop in that time. Which they are as renewables get deployed more and more because they don’t go 100% over budget in time and money.
If we get started building nuclear power plants now, how much will storage and transmission tech improve before they’re even completed, let alone profitable?
It’s not 10-20 years of construction AND 10-20 years at a loss, it’s 10-20 years of construction at a loss. Not great, but up to 40 years as you suggest sounds a lot worse because it’s a misrepresentation.
How long do you think it will take for a nuclear power plant to earn back the $34 billion it takes to build one? They’re definitely not making that much money the first year the plant is online.
It’s that they cost so damn much
The cost of continued fossil fuel use is far higher.
rarely profitable
Profit should not be the motivation of preventing our climate disaster from getting worse. If the private sector isn’t able to handle it, then the government needs to do so itself.
And besides, the only reason fossil fuels are so competitive is because we are dumping billions of dollars in subsidies for them. Those subsidies should instead go towards things that aren’t killing the planet.
Would it be better to dump billions into nuclear power plants that won’t come online for a decade at least, or to dump billions into renewables that can be online and reducing emissions in under a year?
We should worldwide be putting trillions into both. Renewables should be first priority, but not all locations have good solar, wind, and battery options.
That’s your opinion. I think funding nuclear is just burning money and wasting time we don’t have.
You cannot run the entire grid on entirely renewable. We physically don’t have enough lithium in the world to make the batteries for it, and even if you don’t use lithium there would be untold ecological destruction to extract the rare earths.
Renewable and hydroelectric is a solution but not viable everywhere and hydro also causes massive ecological destruction
If we started building nuclear powerplants right now it would take 10-20 years before they’re even online. That’s 10-20 years worth of technology improvements that could make it obsolete, especially if we don’t pin our hopes on nuclear baseload and start building a grid that can be 100% renewable.
And that’s not even mentioning the truly massive budget overruns. Or the environmental impact of mining and refining fuel.
No we don’t, you can use only renewables and just cut the useless spending
The classic shortsighted point of view that has put us in the current situation in the first place.
Ask yourself what put us into current situation
We need both.
It’s not one or the other.
