Is this a joke?
I’ve been told this meme is about as harmful as a chest x-ray. It’s not great but not terrible.
No, it is the truth
Yeah, nothing back there except tons of highly radioactive waste that nobody knows what to do with for the next million years, nothing back there but the risk of contaminating a whole region with radioactive shit like it happened in Chernobyl and Fukushima, nothing back there except for overly expensive energy that’s only cheap because governments subsidized the shit out of it because they thought it was the new big thing you need to have, and now they still do just because. Don’t get me worng, it’s probably still a tiny bit better than burning fossils. But it’s still bullshit.
Sigh, we know EXACTLY what to do with it.
Dig a deep hole into the bedrock, put the waste in dry casks, put the casks in the hole, backfill with clay.
This has been known for decades!
I live in a suburb north of Stockholm in Sweden, here in Scandinavia we have a very stable bedrock, I would absolutely welcome a disposal site for nuclear waste in my suburb, and I am talking about a site that would accept waste from all over the world (for a fee obviously).
It would be simple, create jobs, and allow us to keep using nuclear power to allow for quicker removal of fossil power plants.
As for Chernobyl, TMI and Fukashima, Chernobyl was a bad design which was run by people who lacked access to information about past nuclear accidents, leading to bad management, TMI had a fail deadly indicator system, where a broken light bulb caused incorrect information to be acted on, and Fukashima was built in a bad location.
I recommend you to watch this 2006 BBC Horizon documentary, it is called Nuclear Nightmares and talks about our fear of radiation, and weather or not it is warranted:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7pqwo8
A large coal power plant needs at least 10000 tons of coal every day according to Wikipedia.
A nuclear plant needs about 25 tons per year.
That is a huge, massive difference in logistics, pollution and use of resources, that is not even getting into the coal ash that is produced by cosl plants, according to the EPA, nearly 130 million tons of coal ash was generated in the US by coal power plants. None was generated by nuclear power plants.
Please watch the documentary, it is a few years old, but the premise still holds.
Also just for those still not convinced, that coal ash is radioactive as well, and contains other toxins, and has polluted far more land than nuclear.
Oh absolutely!
Another point is that there are places outside Chernobyl and Fukashima that have higher background radiation that either exclusion zone, and that is places where people live normally, I seem to recall that being mentioned in the documentary I linked.
literally the least efficient in terms of cost and time.
battery backed renewables are a fraction of the price and are being deployed right now.
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/GenCost
edit: the tech is cool as hell. go nuts on research reactors. nuclear medicine has saved my sisters life twice… but i’m sorry, its just not a sane solution to the climate crisis.
Hello from Japan! :)
After nuclear accidents, you get to make anime without shame.
Thats not even funny. It’s not even a meme. It’s just straight outright corporate propaganda. F off with that, Pinkerton!
Wait, I’m seeing a lot of people being very against nuclear. From what I’ve gathered, I see no downsides compared to fossil fuels
It may be too late for nuclear. Too much upfront cost, too long to build. Reneweables are cheaper in the long run, and with storage technologies getting better the problem with base load electricity gets smaller.
It is safe, nuclear, but why bother now.
The Simpsons shows it’s safe and efficient 😅
One of the saddest bits of the show was when they kinda just gave up talking about socio-economic issues and made the whole show revolve around Homer being a big dumb-dumb.
Some of the harshest criticism they had around nuclear power revolved around its privatization and profitization. A bunch of those early episodes amounted to people asking for reasonable and beneficial changes to how the plant was run, then having to fight tooth and nail with the company boss for even moderate reform.
Dental plan! Lisa needs braces.
Don’t forget Blinky, the three eyed fish.
Deep level irony that you used a Simpsons meme, which takes place in a city that suffers from a Nuclear Power Plant that doesn’t dispose of nuclear waste properly.
Every form of energy generation is problematic in the hands of capital. Security measures can and are often considered unnecessary expense. And even assuming that they will respect all safety standards, we still have the problem of fuel: France, for example, was only able to supply its plants at a cheap cost because of colonialism in Africa. Therefore, nuclear energy potentially has the same geopolitical problems as oil, in addition to the particular ones: dual technology that can and is applied in the military, not necessarily but mainly atomic bombs.
__
Also, I thought memes were supposed to be funny…
Yeah, I’d tend to agree on that. Even beyond the security issues, nuclear has the potential to be a safe, but it also has the potential to be disastrous if mis-managed.
We see plenty of issues like this already, including what occurred here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-daiichi-accident
Now imagine a plant in Texas, where power companies response to winter outages has basically been “sucks to be you, winterizing is too costly”.
Or maybe we’d like to go with a long-time trusted company, who totally wouldn’t throw away safety and their reputation for a few extra bucks. Boeing comes to mind.
I like nuclear as a power source, but the absolutely needs to be immutable rules in place to ensure it is properly managed and that anyone attempting to cut corners to save costs gets slapped down immediately. Corporate culture in North America seems to indicate otherwise.
I’d argue it’s almost qualifies as an antimeme
It’s not completely unfunny because of the unintentional irony. Tough it definitely belongs to that specific category of “meme” commonly seen on r/politicalmemes or any of its variants on the feedverse: usually a frame from The Office with text written on a whiteboard, with the ubiquity of the complete absence of a joke.
I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.
You would be surprised to know the amount of scientific research with actual solutions that aren’t applied cause goes against the fossil fuel companies and whatnot. Due to the fact that they have market monopoly.
I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.
Modern nuclear energy produces significantly less waste and involves more fuel recycling than the historical predecessors. But these reactors are more expensive to build and run, which means smaller profit margins and longer profit tails.
Solar and Wind are popular in large part because you can build them up and profit off them quickly in a high-priced electricity market (making Texas’s insanely expensive ERCOT system a popular location for new green development, paradoxically). But nuclear power provides a cheap and clean base load that we’re only able to get from coal and natural gas, atm. If you really want to get off fossil fuels entirely, nuclear is the next logical step.
Economicaly might be viable, but there is so much unused experimental tech that has higher potential and scales better (higher scientific development as well).
Every commercial fuel recycling plant in existence releases large amounts of radioactivity into the air and water, so I dont really see them as a good alternative.
Here is a world map of iodine 129 before fukushima, its one of many radioactive isotopes released at nuclear reprocessing plants: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/images/iupac/j_pac-2015-0703_fig_076.jpg The website where I got it from: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/element/Iodine#section=Isotopes-in-Forensic-Science-and-Anthropology
Considering how long it would take to build safe reactors, how expensive it would be and how much radioactive contamination would be created both at the production of fuel and later when the storage ever goes wrong after thousands of years, I just dont see any reason to ever invest into it nowadays, when renewables and batteries have gotten so good.
I just dont see any reason to ever invest into it nowadays, when renewables and batteries have gotten so good.
Renewables and batteries have their own problems.
Producing and processing cobalt and lithium under current conditions will mean engaging in large-scale deforestation in some of the last unmolested corners of the planet, producing enormous amounts of toxic waste as part of the refinement process, and then getting these big bricks of lithium (not to mention cadmium, mercury, and lead) that we need to dispose of at the battery’s end of lifecycle.
Renewables - particularly hydropower, one of the most dense and efficient forms of renewable energy - can deform natural waterways and collapse local ecologies. Solar plants have an enormous geographic footprint. These big wind turbines still need to be produced, maintained, and disposed of with different kinds of plastics, alloys, and battery components.
Which isn’t even to say these are bad ideas. But everything we do requires an eye towards the long-term lifecycle of the generators and efficient recycling/disposal at their end.
Nuclear power isn’t any different. If we don’t operate plants with the intention of producing fissile materials, they run a lot cleaner. We can even power grids off of thorium. Molten salt reactors do an excellent job of maximizing the return on release of energy, while minimizing the risk of a meltdown. Our fifth generation nuclear engines can use this technology and the only thing holding us back is ramping it up.
Unlike modern batteries, nuclear power doesn’t require anywhere near the same amount of cobalt, lithium, nickel and manganese. Uranium is surprisingly cheap and abundant, with seawater yielding a pound of enrichable uranium at the cost of $100-$200 (which then yields electricity under $.10/kwh).
We can definitely do renewables in a destructive and unsustainable way, recklessly mining and deforesting the plant to churn out single-use batteries. And we can do nuclear power in a responsible and efficient way, recycling fuel and containing the relatively low volume of highly toxic waste.
But all of that is a consequence of economic policy. Its much less a consequence of choosing which fuel source to use.
Nuclear is the best and most sustainable energy production long term. You get left with nuclear waste which we are still figuring out how to deal with, but contemporary reactors are getting safer and more efficient. Not to mention breeder reactors can use the byproducts of their energy production to further produce energy.
I mean renewables are just cheaper…
To a point yes but large scale energy storage needed to make renewables viable to handle all of the load is not economically viable yet
And don’t produce enough energy?
The problem with renewables is the fluctuation. So you need something you can quickly spin up or down to compensate. Now you can do that with nuclear reactors to some extent - but they barely break even at current energy prices, and they keep having the same high cost while idle.
So a combination of grid storage and power plants with low cost when idle (like water) is the way to go now.
What are you talking about? In 2023, solar power alone generated 1.63 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity. Twice as much as was generated by coal, and more than half as much as was generated by nuclear. Solar plus wind out performed nuclear by hundreds of gigawatts.
The only thing holding back renewable power is grid level energy storage, and that’s evolving rapidly.
lol nuclear is really uneconommical, way too expensive and therefore really inefficient. You need 10-20 years to build a plant for energy 3 times more expensive than wind. For plants that still require mining. That produce waste we cannot store and still cannot reuse (except for one small test plant). For plants that no insurance company want to insure and energy companies dont like to build without huge government subsidies.
I know lemmy and reddit have a hard on for nuclear energy because people who dont know anything about it think its cool. But this post is ridiculous even for lemmy standards.
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The French? You’re joking, right? Your nuclear plants are most of the time turned off because they aren’t working properly which destabilizes the entire European grid because you need to import so much electricity from your neighbours.
The only reason why your electricity is still so cheap is because your nuclear plants are so heavily subsidised by the state and the exploding energy prices in the recent past have also been capped by the state fearing the right wing uprise. (Happening nevertheless) An action which ripped deep holes in the government’s funding which is the cause why economists are nowadays more afraid of France’s instable economy and government debt than even Greece’s.
So yeah, your electricity is cheap because you basically f*cked yourself
The only reason why your electricity is still so cheap is because your nuclear plants are so heavily subsidised by the state
There’s also the funny part about the undervalued uranium that comes from the African colonies
The above comment have been deleted so I cannot judge what was said
But, as a french person myself, I can assure you that the state of Nuclear Energy in France is a very complicated topic and you do yourself a disservice talking about it in this fashion
Furthermore, what you state is plainly wrong:
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France export more than import energy
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Nuclear Power plant goes down first on the network because there are more “pilotable” meaning you can start it or reduce their output more easily than others sources of electrical power
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the caping of electricity price is a leftist policy, the right has nothing to do with it and in fact, this is an another very complicated topic that needs to be researched before discussing
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France economy is instable right now yes, but pinning this on government debt is surely a drastic oversimplification of the problem and is more telling of your view of my Country than the effective state of our economy
The above comment have been deleted so I cannot judge what was said
Are you sure? I can still read it? It downplayed the top level comment and said the French have the cheapest electricity because of ‘cheap’ nuclear power production.
Furthermore, what you state is plainly wrong:
- France export more than import energy
No I am not. I stated that the need for importing energy is dangerously high when the nuclear plants are offline. The averaged annual export / import balance is a different number. Comparing both doesn’t make sense. Additional France WAS a net exporter. 2022 it was importing more than exporting. Here is a source:
Nuclear Power plant goes down first on the network because there are more “pilotable” meaning you can start it or reduce their output more easily than others sources of electrical power
Well, I think, gas goes down first. But anyway this is unrelated to my comment. I was talking about shutdowns due to technical issues and repairments. The larger one 2022 is also the reason why the ex/import balance shifted. Just as I claimed.
the caping of electricity price is a leftist policy, the right has nothing to do with it
Sure it’s a leftist policy. I didn’t say it was a right wing policy. I said it was implemented to dampen the effects on inflation. Rising prices fueled (and still fuels) fears in the population which the right wing parties happily exploit.
France economy is instable right now yes, but pinning this on government debt is surely a drastic oversimplification of the problem and is more telling of your view of my Country than the effective state of our economy
I didn’t pinned down anything myself. The concerns of economists and the EU are indeed about France fiscal deficits. The EU started a penalty process just a few days ago because of it
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/19/business/france-budget-deficit-macron.html
France is in debt to the tune of around €3 trillion, or more than 110 percent of gross domestic product, and a deficit of €154 billion, representing 5.5 percent of economic output. The budget crunch comes after Mr. Macron spent heavily to support workers and businesses during pandemic lockdowns. His government also provided subsidies to help households cope with a jump in inflation after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which sent energy prices soaring.
but pinning this on government debt is surely a drastic oversimplification of the problem and is more telling of your view of my Country than the effective state of our economy
Next time when calling someone ‘plainly wrong’ try using sources and arguments instead of an ad hominem
Are you sure? I can still read it?
Yeah, it’s say’s it was deleted by the creator, anyway that not what’s important here
No I am not. I stated that the need for importing energy is dangerously high when the nuclear plants are offline.
You’ve stated :
Your nuclear plants are most of the time turned off because they aren’t working properly which destabilizes the entire European grid because you need to import so much electricity from your neighbours.
The way your statement is worded imply this is a common occurrence when I’m fact it is usually the other way around, France supply a lot of energy to it’s neighbors
Additional France WAS a net exporter. 2022 it was importing more than exporting.
Yes in 2022 a year spectacularly weird for energy production everywhere in Europe thanks to the Ukrainian situation
But in 2023 France export more than import again Source : https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2024/01/17/la-france-est-redevenue-premiere-exportatrice-d-electricite-en-europe-en-2023_6211385_3234.html
But anyway this is unrelated to my comment. I was talking about shutdowns due to technical issues and repairments. The larger one 2022 is also the reason why the ex/import balance shifted. Just as I claimed.
It’s not clear from your text than this was your original intention
I said it was implemented to dampen the effects on inflation. Rising prices fueled (and still fuels) fears in the population which the right wing parties happily exploit.
No you did not say that, you said:
The only reason why your electricity is still so cheap is because your nuclear plants are so heavily subsidised by the state and the exploding energy prices in the recent past have also been capped by the state fearing the right wing uprise.
Inflation doesn’t appear in your text
Furthermore, even if you say that now, the capping of electricity prices are not only to combat inflation, but yes it is a reason, one other is to prevent private company to dictate the price of electricity, as an “essential” it’s important that every one in the country can afford electricity, it’s the same thing here for medication for exemple, state chose the price for almost every medicine you can buy in France
I didn’t pinned down anything myself. The concerns of economists and the EU are indeed about France fiscal deficits. The EU started a penalty process just a few days ago because of it
That’s can be an entire new discussion (that I will not engage here, because I’m, and I think you too, as almost everyone, have not all the keys to discuss it) but economists say’s a lot of things about this subject and forget that’s France is it’s own country and by that, have it’s own way of thinking about debt, for many french leftist economists (not all obviously), debt is a good thing for exemple and that impact the way we use and think gouvernement funding
If you’re interested I can link you to some resources on the question (albeit in french sorry)
PS: Sadly as I’m rereading my message, I’m realizing that the tone of it is harsher than I want it to be, buy I don’t have the time or the energy to rewrite it in a more tasteful maner, sorry again
Your tone is perfectly fine and you made very good points, thank you for the information.
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Renewables are better, cheaper and more scalable. Its not even close. Look at Denmark for how it can be done.
Denmark looking decidedly not green this morning. It’s sunny, but virtually no wind - might be like this for another week. Check the map regularly to understand why unreliable energy is actually just a way of increasing gas usage.
Okay, where is the comparison to nuclear? For that you have to build massive infrastructure, that costs billions, that no one want to insure, thats why it has to be backed by state money. After that the waste has to be managed by the state too, because no company wants to deal with the liability of radioactive waste for thousands of years at least, so that, too, comes out of the taxpayers pockets.
I don’t like fossil fuels, but this is just plain stupid
(and also as a cherry on top, tschernobyl, fokushima)
Sorry - What?
You said Denmark had converted to green energy. I pointed out that they haven’t done anything like that. You are now moving the goal posts and saying “where is the comparative essay defending nuclear power”…
If you must, France turned completely green in the 70s. So they’ve provided 50 years of clean energy. Its a classic story and not as simple as I’m going to make out, but still. Look at the map link in the last post - any area that stays green is either using hydro or nuclear. Hydro is great, but you need mountains and water.
Sorry, yeah maybe that wasn’t the best response.
But you still claiming nuclear is green is just crazy. There is still no place on earth that can hold nuclear waste. Especially not for the thousands of years that it would need. There is nothing clean about energy, that produces waste, that we can’t even handle.
Also, the energy mix in Denmark is very renewable wherever possible (https://ens.dk/en/our-services/statistics-data-key-figures-and-energy-maps/annual-and-monthly-statistics)
I’m sure nuclear can be super safe and efficient. The science is legit.
The problem is, at some point something critical to the operation of that plant is going to break. Could be 10 years, could be 10 days. It’s inevitable.
When that happens, the owner of that plant has to make a decision to either:
- Shut down to make the necessary repairs and lose billions of dollars a minute.
- Pretend like it’s not that big of a deal. Stall. Get a second opinion. Fire/harass anyone who brings it up. Consider selling to make it someone else’s problem. And finally, surprise pikachu face when something bad happens.
In our current society, I don’t have to guess which option the owner is going to choose.
Additionally, we live in a golden age of deregulation and weaponized incompetence. If a disaster did happen, the response isn’t going to be like Chernobyl where they evacuate us and quarantine the site for hundreds of years until its safe to return. It’ll be like the response to the pandemic we all just lived through. Or the response to the water crisis in Flint Michigan. Or the train derailment in East Palestine.
Considering the fallout of previous disasters, I think it’s fair to say that until we solve both of those problems, we should stay far away from nuclear power. We’re just not ready for it.
French here . when a plan has a problem we just shut it down repair and it re work
Hi i was a nuclear mechanic, and that’s not how it works. I’m on the toilet so I’m not gonna explain it now. Arm chair expert, uninformed opinions like this are part of the reason we’re stuck on fossil fuels to begin with.
Everyone brings up Chernobyl like almost 4 entire decades of scientific advancement just didn’t happen.
The problem is not science, the problem is not tech, the problem is people, making decisions, like making Fukushima’s sea barriers 3 or 4 meters shorter than worse case scenario because money. Nuclear can be safe. People and money make it unsafe.
I was a nuclear plant owner and that’s not how it doesn’t work. I too have a toilet related reason why I won’t contribute meaningfully to this discussion.
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You keep keep those next to your toilet?
The reason we’re stuck on fossil fuels isn’t just because of the people’s opinions. The main reason is the same as for most other major problems: money.
Nuclear lobby really tries to sell us to the fact, that it’s better to have control over power by a few big players. Must be terrifying to think about people creating their own power eventually.
Who says it needs to be controlled by a few big players?
I mean, obviously we never would, but there could absolutely be a right way to do this. Nationalization could be a solution. Or something like co-determination.
It doesn’t need to, but it is… It’s fine to have ideas, but let’s keep them SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, REALISTIC, terminated.
Just make it public
It’s definitely not the best we have
Just because it’s safe doesn’t mean it’s the best we have right now.
- It’s massively expensive to set up
- It’s massively expensive to decommission at end of life
- Almost half of the fuel you need to run them comes from a country dangerously close to Russia. (This one is slightly less of a thing now that Russia has bogged itself down in Ukraine)
- It takes a long time to set up.
- It has an image problem.
A combination of solar, wind, wave, tidal, more traditional hydro and geothermal (most of the cost with this is digging the holes. We’ve got a lot of deep old mines that can be repurposed) can easily be built to over capacity and or alongside adequate storage is the best solution in the here and now.
I would like to add, that though we have the means to store the radioactive waste safely, it’s not done properly in many places. So it’s also an organizational challenge.
Storage is not easy when you don’t have massive amounts of free land. This is an ongoing debate in Europe, and in one particular country a leaky storage was discovered just a month or two ago. Again.
And there is no guarantee that what we build today is not going to be a massive liability in 50 or 200 or hell, 500 years. But the companies and people who are responsible will not even exist at this point.
The problem with these arguments and the focus of debates is that they are based on nuclear energy from uranium, not thorium. Thorium is ubiquitous in nature, power centers are much easier to set up and can be small and the waste, while initially (a bit) more radioactive than uranium waste, loses it’s radiation level much faster
Edit:typo
Where are the thorium reactor ? We currently have none. Are we allowed to throw speculative energy source in the debate ?
ILL THROW FUSION!!!
Already India and chine have had working ones for many years. It’s not speculative and I recommend you to research the tech. It’s unfortunately not very present in western nuclear energy debates. Could be a political reason but that’s just a dirty guess
I thought all thorium based reactor were still at the research stage. I made a quick search to see if there was any in actual use but couldn’t find a source. If you have one please send it I’m really interested.
If they are still at the research stage then I’ll wait until one is built at scale to decide whether they are a better alternative.
The abundance of uranium and thorium is of the same magnitude. The thing is economics. Uranium is cheap, and as long it is, we use the sources we have. As the peice of uranium rises other sources get economical including sea water extraction which is effectively renewable.
Uranium is a much scarer source compared to thorium. Uranium can also be used to create nuclear weapons, that’s why other countries have difficulties using the tech because foreign powers are afraid of these consequences
You realise you don’t need to decomission entire building at EOL?
What about the storage for the used fuel? This is a massive problem for any country not occupying half a continent.
As first step separate useful isotopes from used fuel. Most of used fuel are them. The rest won’t be as big.
Probably not a good idea to use russia as your example when youre trying to make nuclear look like the better option…
First one is Ukraine
Former soviet union and the dam was blown up by russia…
Ok. What’s your point? Did I argue that nuclear was unsafe?
Where the fuck we gonna put all the waste product? I’m not saying nuclear power is bad, far from it, but we have two problems here:
- Its cost prohibitive to build new Third Generation reactors that are fault tolerant, and moreso to assure that all the Second Generation reactors are fully fault tolerant given how adjacent they are to flood plains and fault lines in the US
- Where the fuck are we gonna put the waste at? Yucca Mountain is off the table for good, WIPP is nearing capacity for a pilot plant, and we have nothing like Onkalo planned out despite the funding being there many times over
What’s wrong with nuclear waste? Is it radioactive or something? Like the original uranium we got out of the ground?
Where the fuck we gonna put all the waste product?
In the air, so everyone everywhere is interacting with it on a daily basis.
Oh wait, that’s what we do with waste from all the other power plants.
A waste product that can put on a specific spot is easier to deal with than a waste product that can’t.
All the waste a plant ever produces in its lifetime can be contained with ease on site. Waste certainly isn’t the main issue, though it’s portrayed to be. Cost of deployment and staffing are more prohibitive issues, and both are surmountable. I don’t think it’s a bandaid for all power issues, but it’s a powerful tool that should be used more often, not phased out.
On site? For 100000 years?
Or much much longer. It’s not going anywhere. It can’t escape its cask, and outside human intervention the casks won’t be breached. It’s just locked-up metal that gives off some radiation, fully contained within the cask. It isn’t oozing green goo.
outside human intervention the casks won’t be breached
Unless due to tectonic activity…
They’re seismically isolated
Also we do have the ability to re-utilize waste in different types of reactors until it is essentially entirely spent. There is a complete cycle available. Nobody talks about it though because you know, not as cost-effective
All the waste a plant ever produces in its lifetime can be contained with ease on site.
Won’t that create a bunch of targets all over the country? Then terrorists or enemy states can use simple small bombs to make whole areas uninhabitable for the next millennium.
The casks waste is stored in would take bunker buster yields to breach.
Strong enough to be hit by a train full speed too IIRC, plus if we actually built Yucca Mtn anyone getting within 500 miles of Fallon is getting vaporized over the sand long before they can try busting any bunkers
