The irony of Homer Simpson representing safe nuclear energy…
Well, it took much effort for Homer to blow up NPP
Hi, I work in waste handling, and I would like to tell you about dangerous materials and what we do with them.
There are whole hosts of chemicals that are extremely dangerous, but let’s stick with just cyanide, which comes from coal coking, steel making, gold mining and a dozen chemical synthesis processes.
Just like nuclear waste, there is no solution for this. We can’t make it go away, and unlike nuclear waste, it doesn’t get less dangerous with time. So, why isn’t anyone constantly bringing up cyanide waste when talking about gold or steel or Radiopharmaceuticals? Well, that’s because we already have a solution, just not “forever”.
Cyanide waste, and massive amounts of other hazardous materials, are simply stored in monitored facilities. Imagine a landfill wrapped in plastic and drainage, or a building or cellar with similar measures and someone just watches it. Forever. You can even do stuff like build a golfcourse on it, or malls, or whatever.
There are tens of thousands of these facilities worldwide, and nobody gives a solitary fuck about them. It’s a system that works fine, but the second someone suggests we do the same with nuclear waste, which is actually less dangerous than a great many types of chemical waste, people freak out about it not lasting forever.
https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxguides/toxguide-8.pdf
I didn’t know that before but it appears cyanide does have a half-life that is a fraction of nuclear waste.
That doesn’t make it or the other compounds less dangerous, of course.
That’s uhh, not what that says. One of the two mentions of half life are your body converting cyanide into thiocyanate, which will kill you and depending on your last bowel movement, make your corpse into hazardous waste itself.
The other mention is hydrogen cyanide in air, which is lighter than air and will decompose back into cyanide eventually, scattering it over a large area. Which will technically make it go away from your site, but spreading toxic waste over the countryside is illegal for a reason.
Most cyanide in surface water will form hydrogen cyanide and evaporate.
As long as it has a surface to evaporate, it will degenerate.
… Hydrogen cyanide is literally what has been used to execute people in gas chambers and genocide during the Holocaust. The LC(Lo), the lowest recorded lethal concentration is 107ppm, resulting in death in 10 minutes. That’s, objectively, far more dangerous than the respective material that firefighters were exposed to at Chernobyl. You don’t want that in any appreciable quantity in the air around people that you want to continue living.
Oh yeah, you could totally just leave it in a giant pool and ignore it. It’ll react, evaporate and eventually break down into cyanide again, rain down, subtly poison the area, react again, evaporate again, etc.
And that’s great for the owner of the big pool of cyanide, and very bad for everyone else. Stuff that evaporates doesn’t disappear, the cyanide doesn’t magically change into cookiedough. You’re just spreading it around more.
Hydrogen cyanide will turn into “cookie dough” in 1-5 years. Which is way shorter than “forever”.
The way you said it in your first comment made it seem longer lasting than radioactive waste. Which it isn’t according to the linked PDF. That is the only point I was trying to make.
Yeah but how is the Kremlin going to control us with their gas & oil if we have nuclear?
Checkmate uh pro democratic people I guess?
Yeah but how is the Kremlin going to control us with their gas & oil if we have nuclear?
France is EU’s first importer of ‘Russian nuclear products’: study – Euractiv
New report shows Russia raking in revenue from state nuclear company | Fox Business
Russia faces threat of sanctions on nuclear power industry as Germany backs uranium ban – POLITICO
Bratislava to reject EU’s latest sanctions package if it includes ban on Russia nuclear fuel
Russia’s Rosatom Helps Putin Skirt Sanctions
Russia’s nuclear project in Hungary: France’s growing role | OSW Centre for Eastern Studies
https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220517-greenpeace-report-russland-taxonomie.pdf
They have more uranium than we do
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Cyanide is used extensively in precious metal recycling too. So even reclaiming resources has a harsh chemical cost. Meeting workers from there I was surprised to say the least about how ‘casually’ they work with Cyanide. Clearly they have safty protocall but nothing like what I imagined something like Cyanide would call for.
In addition to hazardous materials regulations, I also do workplace safety, and this doesn’t surprise me at aaaaall. People get really casual around stuff that kills you slowly.
Curious to hear you say this. I live in NZ and cyanide waste is always raised as an objection to gold mining.
An unfortunate reality is that while we CAN store things safely, that doesn’t mean they always will be.
There are downsides to nuclear these days. Incredibly high cost with a massive delay before they’re functioning. Solar + wind + pumped hydro + district heating is where it’s at in 2024.
This.
Also, tie together more countries’ power grids to even out production and demand of renewables, and reduce the need for other backup sources.
For a fraction of the cost of nuclear, increase the storage capacity as well. We’ve had days where the price per MWh was negative in many hours, because of excess production.
The barriers to carbon free energy aren’t technical, they’re purely political.
Yeah, back in 2010 and before nuclear was the way to go but with the incredible advancements in solar and wind it’s no longer the best option.
Still shame on Germany for decommissioning nuclear reactors and deciding to build Nordstream 2 and burn coal as a replacement.
You probably also didnt heard about Thorium based molten salt reactors, they are much safer than conventional nuclear, also cheaper, and you can have a 50MW installation in space not much larger than a shipping container. A 50MW solar installation is close to 1km2 and thats without any storage included. It even can be modified to run on spent fuel of conventional nuclear power plants.
SMRs are DOA. They have been “the next big thing” for decades now. They need to shit or get off the pot.
No industry has quite so much vaporware technology as nuclear power. Any idiot can promise and never deliver. Look at Elon Musk.
with the incredible advancements in solar and wind it’s no longer the best option.
I haven’t heard of any advancement that makes solar generate energy when the sun doesn’t shine and wind generate energy when the wind isn’t blowing.
it has got cheaper, but it has to get cheap enough that you can buy enough batteries with the difference. I’m not sure it has become that cheap. Maybe these sodium battery things will get developed.
You haven’t heard of any advancements in energy storage at all?
Not that we need them, the best energy storage is old AF and excellent
The wind is always blowing somewhere and overproduction is cheaper than batteries
You can’t overproduce electricity. You have to match the load.
I know. There are many solutions to this
No, there is pumped storage. Honestly, despite the plethora of start-ups claiming to have a solution (sodium batteries, molten-salt, etc) The only really proven way to store electricity for later is pumped storage, but that relies on geography (hills) which not everyone has. Batteries are great for phones, and cars but they simply don’t scale to countries.
Overproduction is how you get blackouts from damaging the grid
Lol, just dump energy into resistors. Or desync two generators.
Or convert excess to hydrogen and provide resilience, or have arrangements for industry to consume the excess. Or ramp down your generation at those times. Or shift excess to neighbouring grids.
This is wrong. Right now, europe is experiencing high pressure and doesn’t have any wind. Check this out its map that shows you how much wind is being produced right now! Can you provide a source that says " the wind is always blowing somewhere" or is it just a platitude?
Please understand that negative prices are the market for electricity breaking down! That is not a good thing. It should mean that if you have solar panels on your roof you have to pay to participate in the national grid because you are dumping energy into the grid when it can’t use it, but special rules have been made for renewable plants. Literally, imagine a contract-to-supply for wind or solar…
I understand very well the implications of the negative price, which is why I advocated NOT to spend trillions in nuclear, when issues of balancing demand and production can be solved for a fraction of what nuclear costs.
You don’t need to tie grids to transfer energy between them.
Still not a reason to not build them, the entire point is for nuclear to handle the load when solar/wind can’t provide due to weather. Other renewables will still be producing the bulk of the power we need, but at night nuclear will be handling any demand spikes, each of them would greatly reduce the number of batteries required to satisfy the demand. They can stay until our solar output is so high we can just start electrolyzing water into hydrogen as energy storage.
That’s why they mentioned “pumped hydro”
Though pumped hydro is sometimes opposed by environmental groups because it does absolutely decimate local environments.
I have high hopes for sodium batteries. The ones that have been released on the market are simply perfect (if scaled up) for local grid storage in countries with a lot of space and will hopefully get better energy density in line with Lithium Iron Phosphate with time.
Salt batteries have been the cold fusion of battery tech for like 10 years, but now it is finally coming to fruition. I hope to install a solar installation with salt batteries in 5 years or so, myself.
If you’re suggesting using Nuclear as a peaker plant or to turn it off and on whenever wind/solar is not up for it then I’m sorry to say that it’s not viable. Nuclear generators don’t handle well being turned off and on.
My good friends Xenon and Samarium.
district heating is where it’s at in 2024.
You don’t have those in 2024? Commies built central heating in every city.
Iceland, where I’m from, has had it for ages in pretty much every house.
You can make Thorium reactors much smaller and cheaper, basically a 50MW unit is not much larger than a shipping container, while being much more safe than standard nuclear plants. The largest issue is over-regulation of the nuclear power in general.
A 50MW of solar installation is HUGE, and thats 50MW at the sunniest part of the planet: https://newsaf.cgtn.com/news/2019-12-15/Kenya-launches-Chinese-built-50MW-solar-power-plant-MqC575l6Te/index.html, We are basically talking about close to a square kilometer installation…
there is simply no way to call a 50MW solar plant cleaner than nuclear and its probably not even that much cheaper in the end. Compare that to a shipping container sized reactor… Only thing in the way, is the nuclear scare and government regulations.
The cost is less from the design and more from the safety regulations. Best case scenario the state just starts making nuclear power plants, it’s just not a good idea to mix profit incentive with nuclear.
If you’re interested in energy solutions and haven’t read the RethinkX report on the feasibility of a 100% solar, wind and battery solution, it’s definitely worth taking a look.
Whilst I agree that we need to decarbonise asap with whatever we can, any new nuclear that begins planning today is likely to be a stranded asset by the time it finishes construction. That money could be better spent leaning into a renewable solution in my view.
The materials needed to produce batteries and wind turbines and maintain them over time is the issue. Did your 62 page report discuss this?
Doesn’t seem to be including the land usage.
Does it cover everyone on the planet using the same amount of electricity as a North American? 8 billion people now. And usage is increasing too, gotta power EVs and AI (but not limited to that).
im fine with dropping AI for more humans right now, but apparently that wont generate shareholder value.
First it doesn’t matter because it’s going to happen whether we want it to or not.
Second the whole point is that electricity use per capita is always increasing.
Idk if people would drop AI… sad
Nah, they won’t. It goes bling-bling, has a couple of good use cases, but because it generates Market Hype, Companies will cram it into everything. And i hate it.
In Spain we are starting to get negative prices every weekend for electricity thanks to renewables. France is not even close to those prices with their bet for nuclear.
Don’t get me wrong, I love nuclear power. And I’m not a big fan ok what thousands of windmills made to our landscapes. But efficiency wise renewable is unbeatable nowadays.
The Spanish government is now petitioning its public for ideas on how to waste power.
time to start mining for crypto and running LLM AI servers.
Mine bitcoins. Or ditch capitalism. Wait, last one is opposite of wasting. Feed capitalism.
Look. Bitcoins might be useless at a societal level. But if we’re going to use excess renewable energy to drive out of business the crypto-miners who get their power from coal…
They should have public fridges that are left open to help cool the planet.
They don’t need to be exclusive. Power generation should be diverse. Otherwise prices will go through the roof on times without wind (happens in Germany). This can lead to higher energy prices in combination with high energy exports.
Nuclear power does not solve the issue here. Nuclear reactors take hours or even days to ramp up or down. They are not quick enough to react to such occasions.
True, it wouldn’t be enough, This is why Germany still has a lot of coal-fired power station and natural gas power stations, despite huge investments into renewables, and is also investing a lot into wood-fired power stations (imo a really terrible idea). The nuclear plants could still ease the situation by giving a stable basic load that has some planable variability (wind models are getting also better every year and aren’t that bad as it is). For now renewables cannot really provide a very stable basic load (at least not here, might be different for other areas).
There are great concepts to improve all of this with stuff like pumped-storage hydroelectricity, but those cannot be build everywhere and take up a lot of space. It is going forward and I think nuclear power will come to an end eventually. For now, I think they still have their place (and imo Germany acted irrationally by shutting them all down).
I mean, we’ve been lucky that France completly fucked their energy sector up (hints towards that nuclear plants probably also won’t be the ultimate solution), otherwise we’d have lost a loooot of money and would have had energy prices even worse.
Here an imo interesting read: https://gemenergyanalytics.substack.com/p/capture-price-of-importsexports-in
Meanwhile in Georgia (USA) they completed a new nuclear power plant and they have to raise rates because it went 100% over its $14 billion budget.
Like every other nuclear power plant ever built
Like every other US government project ever built.
•cough cough• SLS •cough•
Negative energy prices are a bad thing! That means that someone is dumping energy into the grid (you should be paying the grid if you have solar panels!!) In the UK all renewable energy had to be called ‘experimental’ so that the pricing was fixed and the government picks up the tab - that’s not good. Check this map - right now the wind isn’t blowing and solar hasn’t got out of bed - so most of the countries using renewables are looking shit - later today solar will kick in, but tonight it will be bad again. That isn’t a solution.
There are two main problems in my opinion, and they are both related to the “fuel”. First, uranium is rare and you often need to buy it from other countries. For instance, Russia. Not great. Second, it is not renewable energy. We can’t rely on nuclear fission in the long run. Then there’s also the issue of waste, which despite not being as critical as some argue, is still a problem to consider
Uranium is not that rare. Doesn’t Canada have quite a bit of it? Portugal used to mine it too, as well as several countries in Africa
Yeah, countries obtaining uranium really isn’t that big of an obstacle.
A big problem IMO is the generational responsibility of the waste as well. There needs to be decades of planning, monitoring and maintaince to ensure waste sites are safe and secure, this can be done but modern political climates can make it difficult.
Agreed, dealing with the waste is a thing. But for me a solvable problem and something that doesn’t need to be solved right away. We currently store a lot of nuclear waste in holding locations till we figure out a way to either make it less radioactive or store it for long enough. The alternative however is having coal plants all over the world spew all their dust (including radioactive dust) and CO2 straight into the atmosphere. This to me is a far bigger issue to solve. It isn’t contained in one location, but instead ends up all over the world. It ends up in people’s homes and bodies, with a huge impact to their health. It ends up in the atmosphere, with climate change causing huge (and expensive) issues.
The amount of money we need to handle nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude lower than what we are going to have to pay to handle climate change. And that isn’t even fixing the issue, just dealing with the consequences. I don’t know how we are ever going to get all that carbon back out of the atmosphere, but it won’t be cheap.
It’d be nice to prioritise it at least rather than tucking it away under the oil and gas rug. There is no real competition in energy output to a nuclear power plant. And despite its egregious up front cost, operating it is relatively low cost.
In regards to fuel, uranium is used often but there is options such as thorium that have been used with some success. I do agree it is unfortunate to have to purchase from other countries but I think it beats buying natural gas from wherever it may be sold.
The mining is also usually a really polluting affair for the region, much more than the what power generation might suggest. And overall, in many countries there is a lot of subsidies going on for hidden costs, especially relating to the waste and initial construction. So it is not as cheap as a first look might suggest.
I’m not against it per se, it is better than fossil fuels, which simply is the more urgent matter, but it’s never been the wonder technology it has been touted as ever since it first appeared.
One thing to remember about the mining issue is that coal mining is just as bad, and coal is often radioactive as well. More people have died from radiation poisoning due to coal power/mining than have died from radiation poisoning due to nuclear power, even when you include disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Of course, we’ve also been mining and using coal a lot longer, but the radioactive coal dust and possibly radioactive particles in the smoke from coal plants is something that many people are unaware of.
But, like you said, the big thing is to move away from fossil fuels entirely, and nuclear power has its own issues. It doesn’t so much matter what we go with so long as we do actually go with something, and renewables are getting better and better all the time.
Coal has caused more deaths this year than the entire history of nuclear anything has in total. This includes nuclear energy, nuclear research, nuclear medicine, nuclear irradiation (food storage), and too many orphan sources.
There are some reactor designs that run on waste of standard reactors. It would solve two of your points for at least some decades.
you often need to buy it from other countries. For instance, Russia. Not great.
Yeeeeah, I wouldn’t worry about that. Sure we (Australia) are conservative with our fears of mining and exporting uranium, especially with the Cold War and reactor whoopsies around the world. But historically it doesn’t take much for us to go down on an ally.
Just let us finish unloading all our coal off to the worst polluting nations first, then we’ll crack the top-shelf stuff.
Uranium isn’t the only possible fuel. It’s just the one we’ve been using (because it’s the one that lets you make nuclear weapons).
Buying uranium from Canada and Australia? Inconceivable!
That’s why we need fusion, which will use a lot of the same tech.
I don’t think it will. The large cost of a reactor will probably be shared, but fission plants don’t deal with plasma, magnets, hydrogen/helium storage, lasers, or capacitors. And we don’t even know the method by which a practical fusion plant will operate!
I am talking in the sense that the same companies are participating in fusion research, and pretty sure the methods you mentioned are utilized somewhat in nuclear plants. Like handling and filtering radioactive materials.
Radioactive waste maybe. Fusion plants are likely to create irradiated parts that degrade quickly, similar to fission plants. Fusion fuel on the other hand, is gaseous, and likes to escape. Hydrogen is explosive, while helium-3 is just expensive.
Except that you don’t need uranium for nuclear reactors. The reason it’s used traditionally because it’s also used for nuclear weapons. Thorium is a much better fuel that’s more abundant. China has already started operating these types of reactors. The other advantage of this design is that they use molten salt instead of water for cooling. Molten salt reactors don’t need to be built next to large bodies of water, and they are safer because salt becomes solid when it cools limiting the size of contamination in case of an accident.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Operating-permit-issued-for-Chinese-molten-salt-re
I’m pro nuke energy but to pretend there are no downsides is what got us into the climate mess we are in in the first place.
Cost, being a major drawback, space being another. And of course while they almost never fail, they do occasionally, and will again. And those failures are utterly catastrophic, and it’d hard to convince a community to welcome a nuclear plant, and if the community doesn’t want it then it can’t or shouldn’t be forced onto them.
They also represent tactical strike sites in time of combat engagement. Big red X for a missile.
There are also significant environmental concerns, as we really have no good way to dispose of nuclear waste in a safe or efficient manner at this time.
It’s likely that nuclear based energy is the future, but you need to discuss the bad with the good here or we are just going to end up at square one again. There are long term ramifications.
Worth noting that all modern failures have been GE models or ancient Westinghouse models. Modern nuclear reactors built by Westinghouse are virtually immune from meltdown, and Westinghouse is the lead player in new builds. Nuclear safety has come miles since the like of Fukushima, and especially 3 Mile Island. I’d feel perfectly safe living near a new Westinghouse nuclear plant.
I’d rather a nuclear plant as my neighbor rather than a coal or natural gas one.
One has a one in a million chance to kill you. The other has a 100 in 100 chance to cause you severe health issues in the longrun.
Those health issues while being a problem are in no danger of killing humanity. Wether they affect hundreds, thousands, even millions.
ONE really bad nuclear disaster can make a whole continent uninhabitable.
The risks are on totally different magnitudes.
There’s always a way to fail. Always.
There are no unsinkable ships. No matter how safe the Titanic is, keep enough of them on the sea and one will eventually sink the way least people expected. If life on Earth depends on a Titanic never sinking…we’re fucked eventually.
Life on Earth depends on no more than a couple on nuclear plants blowing up catastrophically.
Wdym space with nuclear energy?
Nuke energy! Actually, don’t. We need it.
They also represent tactical strike sites in time of combat engagement. Big red X for a missile.
Practice shows that in land wars instead of big X it is just burden for both sides. I’m talking Putin-Ukraine war.
That’s a single single war, and not indicative, power supply remains and always has been a high priority target.
Just cause putin and Kiev avoid chernobyl isn’t really evidence to the contrary
power supply remains and always has been a high priority target.
I’m not denying this. But mostly power distribution instead of power generation was targeted.
I agree with everything you say. It really is spot on. What I don’t understand is how, with your awareness, do you still consider yourself pro-nuclear. Honest question, I really am curious.
This is a shocker for many on social media but you can accept that something you want is not perfect but still want it, or see good in a bad person, but still not want them on the throne.
Just because I can be realistic about it’s pros and cons instead of blindly parroting that I have been told to parrot doesn’t mean I can’t be pro nuclear.
Other power sources have more problems. And I say just launch the waste into space and eventually the reactors will just be out of the stratosphere and it won’t matter if it explodes.
But you got to walk before you can run.
I just dislike when people pretend there are no downside to nuke, EV, wind, etc, because if they make one little comment on a con suddenly they’re some anti enviro Trump sucker and get dogpiled
There’s a difference in something being not perfect and being fundamentally flawed. My confusion is because you perfectly verbalized why I think it’s flawed.
I could understand being in favor of using nuclear temporarily until renewables are more reliable. I don’t agree but I understand the thought process. It’s a calculated risk, an acceptable gamble. But being aware of all the issues with nuclear and still be in favor of it long term, in my opinion, doesn’t make sense.
Mind you, I’m not trying to attack you, I’m genuinely intrigued and curious.
And I say just launch the waste into space
This immediately discards like, everything you’ve said up until now, though. It matters if it explodes on the way up challenger style and irradiates half of the continent with a massive dirty bomb of nuclear waste. It’s way more cost effective, efficient, and safer to just put it somewhere behind a big concrete block and then pay some guy to watch it 24/7, and make sure the big concrete block doesn’t crack open or suffer from water infiltration or whatever.
If a single point of obvious facetiousness or a single point that you dislike discredited my entire comment for you, then you’re just a bot.
Come on. Flex that brain. You can do it.
then you’re just a bot.
I mean to be fair you do make it pretty easy to discredit your entire argument, when you’re just gonna say that anyone calling you out on this very obviously stupid idea is a bot. Like that’s the same thing again.
Maybe I’m a victim of Poe’s law, but I’ve seen “launch nuclear waste into space” get way more repute than it deserves as an idea from people who have no clue about the actual issues with, even just normal aspects to do with energy generation. It’s a shorthand signal that lets me know that someone’s had all their thinking on it done for them by shitty pop science and shitty science journalism. It’s like if someone believes in antivax, or something. I’m probably not going to really think they’re a credible source, after that. This is also bad if the shit they’re saying is itself lacking in external sources which I can rely on outside of them.
I’m also flexing my brain right now because none of the shit you said at all really backs up the idea the nuclear energy is the future. Like, if you think it’s inevitable that more plants collapse and it’s inevitable that nuclear power plants get destroyed by missiles in times of war (also a great idea, on par with disposing of it in space, let me irradiate the exact area I’m trying to capture for miles and miles around), then you wouldn’t want nuclear power. If you believe in that and then you also believe in the overblown problem of nuclear waste, then there’s not really a point, there’s no point at which the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
The reason people aren’t going to accept nuclear if they believe it has cons is because like half of those cons are, albeit overblown, catastrophic for life on the planet, and the other half are failures to conceptualize based on economic boogeymen, just the same as with solar power. Political will problems, rather than problems with physical reality or core technologies. But still, problems that conflict with the existence of the idea itself.
You’re not going to convince people to go in on nuclear power, your stated idea, if you only point out it’s flaws, and then also post ridiculous shit.
Man I’m not reading that whole chat gpt wall of text
too dumb to read
checks out
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.
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 ?
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?
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.
Cost billions and have 10 year lead times?
Yes. Should have started more 10years ago, but doesn’t mean don’t start now.
We’re reaching the point where discussing cost in regard to the energy crisis makes us look like fucking idiots.
Imagine what kids reading the history books are going to think of these discussions.
And 10 years isn’t that long really. If someone said we could use no fossil fuels in energy generation in 10 years time that doesn’t sound long at all.
Wdym 10 year lead times?
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.
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.
I agree it’s safe but idk it’s the best we currently have, I think that probably depends on locale.
Solar and wind (and maybe tidal?), with pumped hydro energy storage is probably cheaper, safer, and cleaner… But it requires access to a fair bit more water than a nuclear plant requires, at least initially.
But nuclear is still far better than using fossil fuels for baseline demand.
Land usage is also a huge concern with hydro power. Pumped hydro storage means permanently flooding an area to create the reservoir, which carries many above and beyond just the destruction of whatever was there before. The flooded land has vegetation on it, which is now decaying under water. This can release all sorts of unpleasantness, most notably mercury.
I agree it absolutely has problems and I hope we come up with a better solution in the near future.
But it’s currently the lesser evil. Even though nuclear plants don’t need a lot of fuel, getting that fuel is still typically more damaging than creating a water reservoir, or using an existing natural reservoir.
Land usage is what makes nuclear the most ecologically sound solution. Solar and wind play their part. But for every acre of land, nuclear tops the chart of power produced per year. And when you’re trying to sate the demand of high density housing and businesses in cities, energy density becomes important. Low carbon footprint is great for solar and wind but if you’re also displacing ecosytems that would otherwise be sucking up carbon, its not as environmentally friendly as we’d like.
Are you displacing whole ecosystems, though?
How much do wind farms affect grasslands and prairies, etc? They’ll have an impact for sure, but it’s not like the whole place gets paved over.
And solar can get placed on roofs of existing structures. Or distributed so it doesn’t affect any one area too much.I have to admit idk much about sourcing the materials involved in building solar panels and windmills. Idk if they require destructive mining operations.
I imagine that a nuclear reactor would require more concrete, metal, and rate earth magnets that a solar/wind farm, but idk. I likewise don’t know the details about mining and refining the various fissile material and nuclear poisons.The other advantage of renewables is that it’s distributed so it’s naturally redundant. If it needs to get shut down (repairs, or a problem with the grid) it wont have a big impact.
I like nuclear, and it’s certainly the better choice for some locations, but many locations seems better suited for renewable
https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Land-use-of-energy-technologies_1350.png
I’m not against renewables but utilizing them as our main source of energy just is not practical for long term, there are serious ecological issues that have been sidelined because of global warming/climate change. Things like rooftop solar only become viable in low density housing, but low density housing is also not good use of land.
I agree it’s not the ideal solution, but it’s better than most solutions we have, depending on location.
Rooftop solar doesn’t only need to be on residential buildings, it can also be on industrial and commercial buildings, which take a significant land area.
One last benefit of most renewable energy that is related to its distributed nature: it’s easy to slowly roll out update and replacements. If a new tech emerges you can quickly change your rollout plan to use the new tech, and replace the old tech a little bit at a time, without any energy disruption.
With mega-projects like nuclear reactors, you can’t really change direction mid-construction, and you can’t just replace the reactors as new tech comes online, because each reactor is a huge part of the energy supply and each one costs a fortune.Also, according to the doc you shared of land-use, in-store wind power is nearly the same as nuclear, since the ecology between the windmills isn’t destroyed.
So while I agree that nuclear absolutely has a place, and that renewables have some undesirable ecological repercussions, they’re still generally an excellent solution.
The elephant in the room, though, is that all the renewable solutions I mentioned will require energy storage, to handle demand variation and production variation. The most reliable and economically feasible energy storage is pumped hydro, which will have a similar land usage to hydro power. On the upside, although it has a significant impact, it does not make the land ecological unviable, it just changes what ecosystem will thrive there - so sites must be chosen with care.
If only question was about grassland vs grassland with solar. I live in country, where 46% of land is forests.
Right, like I’ve said it’s not the best solution everywhere. But where it’s an option (which is many places) it’s a better one. Not solar in the case of grasslands, probably wind. But you get the idea.
Given that solar and wind are cheaper, get built to schedule and far less likely to have cost overruns, this meme is bullshit.
Sure, nukes are great. But we need clean energy right the fuck now. Spending money on new nukes is inefficient when it could be spent on solar and wind.
The best strategies are rarely single trick. Energy should be diversely sourced.
We already have 30% nukes. Right now we need more solar and wind. I’m not saying shut down nukes. They are good. They are just a waste of money and time to build new when we have cheaper and easier to produce alternatives.
Where is this that has 30% nuclear already?
This, this should be common sense, and I don’t understand why it’s not.
Okay, so, say I need some energy that’s pretty dense in terms of the space that it takes up, say I need a large amount of constant energy draw, and say that I need a form of energy that’s going to be pretty stable and not prone to variation in weather events. I.e. I seek to power a city. This isn’t even really a far-fetched hypothetical, this is a pretty common situation. What energy source seems like the best for that? Basically, we’re looking at hydropower, which generally has long term environmental problems itself, and is contextually dependant, or nuclear.
Solar also makes sense, wind energy also makes sense, for certain use cases. Say I have a very spread out population or I have a place where space is really not at a premium, as is the case with much of america, and america’s startling lack of population density, that might be the case. But then, I kind of worry that said lack of population density in general is kind of it’s own ongoing environmental crisis, and makes things much, much harder than they’d otherwise need to be.
I think the best metaphor for nuclear that I have is the shinkansen. I dunno what solar would be, in this metaphor, maybe bicycles or something. So, the shinkansen, when it was constructed, costed almost double it’s expected cost and took longer then anyone thought it would and everybody fucking hated it, on paper. In practice, everybody loves that shit now, it goes super fast, and even though it should be incredibly dangerous because the trains are super light and have super powerful motors and no crash safety to speak of, they’re pretty well-protected because the safety standards are well in place. It’s something that’s gone from being a kind of, theoretical idiot solution, to being something that actually worked out very well in practice.
If you were to propose a high speed rail corridor in the US, you would probably get the same problems brought up, as you might if you were to plan a nuclear site. Oh, NIMBYs are never gonna let you, it’s too expensive, we lack the generational knowledge to build it, and we can patch everything up with this smaller solution in e-bikes and micromobility anyways. Then people don’t pay attention to that singular, big encompassing solution, and the micromobility gets privatized to shit and ends up as a bunch of shitty electric rental scooters dumped in rivers and a bunch of rideshare apps that destroy taxi business. These issues which we bring up strike me as purely being political issues, rather than real problems. So, we lack generational knowledge, why not import some chinese guys to build some reactors, since they can do it so fast? Or, if we’re not willing to deal with them, south korean?
I’m not saying we can’t also do solar and renewables as well, sure, those also have political issues that we would need to deal with, and I am perfectly willing to deal with them as they come up and as it makes sense. If you actually want a sober analysis, though, we’re going to need to look at all the different use cases and then come up with whichever one actually makes sense, instead of making some blanket statement and then kind of, poo-pooing on everything else as though we can just come up with some kind of one size fits all solution, which is what I view as really being the thing which got us into this mess. Oooh, oil is so energy dense, oooh, plastic is so highly performing and so cheap and we don’t even have to set up any recycling or buyback schemes,
oooh, let’s become the richest nation on the planet by controlling the purchasing of oil. We got lulled into a one size fits all solution that looked good at the time and was in hindsight was a large part in perhaps a civilization ending and ecologically costly mistake.
The global leader in solar and wind is China. As a result those things are now communism and we can’t have them.
Global leader in nuclear is also China. They are actually building the reactors that cannot meltdown, but you also can’t make weapons from them, and they can run on the nuclear waste we have already produced with the crappy cheap reactors we use. We designed the reactors that China is now building 60 fucking years ago, and just shelved the design.
Real patriots demand private investment in carbon capture only.
How is China so good at handling energy
They don’t have to care about things like cost of the projects, NIMBYs, ecological or historical damage, or regulations
Funny that you call them “Nukes”. You really don’t like the nuclear power plants if you call them the same as nuclear weapons.
dude I say nuke when I microwave things
That’s the fun part about being in a place where you can hold a discussion. Some people don’t agree with you, but they can still see the benefits of the option you are talking about or even agree that they are a great solution for now.
The funny this is that I was a nuke person for a long time, until the facts changed. Nukes were really great fifteen years ago. But solar and wind have surpassed them in terms of cost so my opinion changed. Good shit.
Are solar and wind really “clean” energy? Everyone in this thread seems to ignore the costs of these methods.
Every modern wind turbine requires 60 gallons of highly synthetic oil to function, and it needs to be changed every 6 months. That’s a lot of fossil fuel use.
Lithium mining for batteries is extremely destructive to the environment.
Production of solar panels burns lots of fuel and produces many heavy metals. Just like with nuclear waste, improper disposal of these toxic elements can be devastating to the environment.
Of course, solar and wind are a big improvement over coal and natural gas. I dont want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, I just want to be realistic about the downfalls of these methods.
I believe, with our current technology, that nuclear is our cleanest and greenest option.
Ok so, realistically, if we all agree on this today, when would new nuclear power plants begin generating electricity? With all the regulations which are in place today?
≈20-30 years, outside of China. They should have the first molten salt reactors being turned on in another 8 years or so, but they started those projects in 2020
If we “all agree” and do a moonshot construction plan we could have electricity in 8 years. This is a fantasy, tho.
Best case scenario in the real world is operational in 12 years.
In the capitalist hellscape here in the US, a reasonable expectation would be 18-20 years.
20 years also happens to be the lifespan of our wind turbines. In 20 years, all of the currently running wind turbine blades will be in a landfill and new ones will need to be manufactured to replace them.
No reasonable person is suggesting nuclear as a short-term option. It’s a long term investment.
Windmil blades need to be replaced far more often than anything even half that expensive at nuclear facilities and require huge costs in chemicals and transportation. Off shore blades need even more frequent replacement. The best gelcoats in the world arent going to stave off salty air and water spray for long, and as soon as water gets in one small spot, the entire composite begins to delaminate. You don’t pay as much down the line with nuclear and you dont have to worry about offsetting the carbon output of manufacturing new blades so frequently.
Renewables are cheaper per kwh, but it’s yet to be seen if they’re cheaper when you get to higher grid renewable percentages and need to involve massive grid storage.
In the US we already have something like 30% which alleviates pretty much all the storage concerns. For our dollar right now, solar and wind are the best place to invest.
Agree, but the leadtime is very long, so where’s the best place to invest in 10 years? Hopefully the grid is much more renewable then.
