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.
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.
we tried to, then the state we were gonna stick it all in said "eh maybe we don't want to the country's home for spent fuel, considering how it will stay hot for tens of thousands of years.
so our solution was to just... ignore it. store it in cooling pools at every plant spread all over the country. because hundreds of different waste holding ponds are SURE to be better than the thing we were planning lol.
They made the hard choice of where to put the waste and stuck with it long enough to build the facility. They call it “Onkalo”. It’s a creepy marvel of engineering.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Economicaly might be viable, but there is so much unused experimental tech that has higher potential and scales better (higher scientific development as well).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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, enough 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
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.
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.
Yes yes. Let's continute to use energy sources which are limited in terms of available but necessary resources and cause highly problematic by-products. It has been going on so well so far. Hasn't it?
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.
Nothing about nuclear energy production is good, sensible and safe! You are dependent on a finite resource, you have to put in an incredible amount of effort to keep it running. Not to mention the damage caused by a malfunction (see Fukushima and Chernobyl).
What are you even talking about?!?! There is so much uranium in the world. Even if we completely switched over to nuclear power and without improvements in Nuclear tech, our sun would have fizzled out and we still would have uranium left.
Uranium is more abundant than silver and we don't need much to power a nuclear reactor.
I like how people take Fukushima and Chernobyl as examples for disasters. Please go look up how many people have died from those disasters. Please go check. I'll wait.
Chernobyl: 2
Fukushima: 0
Keep in mind that Chernobyl was built in the 50s with 50s tech it never maintained during the USSR era.
Fukushima did not anticipate a tsunami. Because of the Fukushima disaster we know have new protocols to improve future nuclear builds. If anything Fukushima is a prime example how safe a nuclear reactor can be even when the worst scenario happens.
I like how people take Fukushima and Chernobyl as examples for disasters. Please go look up how many people have died from those disasters. Please go check. I'll wait.
Chernobyl: 2
Fukushima: 0
Are you really that dillusional that you think that the only casualties are the people who died in the incident? Hundreds of peoples suffered from cancer and other long term effects alone in chernobyl. The area is still hazardous to people (as some 'clever' Russian invaders just proofed two years ago)
What are you even talking about?!?! There is so much uranium in the world. Even if we completely switched over to nuclear power and without improvements in Nuclear tech, our sun would have fizzled out and we still would have uranium left.
Uranium is more abundant than silver and we don't need much to power a nuclear reactor.
And yet we would still be dependent on an industry, just as we are today on coal, gas and oil.
I like how people take Fukushima and Chernobyl as examples for disasters. Please go look up how many people have died from those disasters. Please go check. I'll wait.
As others have already answered: far more people died than you claim here! How much land was made uninhabitable for centuries? How many animals would have to die? How much food would have to be destroyed because it was contaminated?
What happens if a tsunami hits an offshore wind farm? They collapse... And then? Do they have to be rebuilt?But you can do that because the land has not been contaminated
Furthermore, any energy production that has the potential to injure, harm or kill thousands of people cannot be considered safe. Just because nothing has happened so far.
There is so much uranium in the world. Even if we completely switched over to nuclear power and without improvements in Nuclear tech, our sun would have fizzled out and we still would have uranium left.
TL;DR: If we switched over to nuclear, we’d burn through the world’s reserves of accessible uranium ore in less than twenty years. Hopefully the sun will last a bit longer than that.
According to 2022 Red Book, there are around 8 million tonnes of Uranium which we could extract for $260 or less, per kg. The current price for uranium is around half that, FYI, so nuclear fuel prices would have at least doubled by the point we’re extracting that last million tonne.
Nuclear power plants use around 20 tonnes of uranium per TWh, according to the world nuclear association, and world energy consumption is around 25,000 TWh per year, according to the IEA. That would be half a million tonnes of uranium consumed per year. Meaning we would burn through the world’s reserve of reasonably accessible uranium in just sixteen years.
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.
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:
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.
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.
@spicytuna62 It's not the best we got. The best we got is to stop the wasteful overproduction and stop letting society being about building building building.
We should rather reframe society into being about growing and localizing the economy. Focusing on living with nature, not at it's expense.
I don't disagree with you, but this is unrealistic. Starting the whole principles of society from scratch is never gonna happen. We should focus on making sure that, while we still "build and build", it is in a sustainable way, using renewable energy sources, as well as nuclear.
Edit: this is not saying we don't need societal change, there are definitely lots of things that need fixing, but it's never gonna be done all at once, completely different. What needs to happen is we focus on the core of the problems, fix that now, and then it will end up looking completeley different than what we have today.
I don’t disagree with you, but this is unrealistic.
But...we don't have a choice if we are to survive. Continuation with any system like our current system (i.e. exploitation of nature for economic growth) will lead to obvious ecological collapse. Why is certain ecological collapse viewed as the more realistic choice?
This is akin to a person well on their way to a heart attack saying "well, eating healthy is unrealistic, so let's switch to diet coke and pretend that's enough"
Yes, except we shouldn't "pitch" it as a total change if we want it to happen. Unfortunately the general public has been brainwashed into believing we are basically either terrorists or we belong in an asylum. It's insane but it's the world we live in....
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...
Where the fuck are we gonna put the waste ad? 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
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.
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.
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
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.
But we don't really have it now, which is the main problem. In the time it takes to build these things (also for the money it takes), we could plaster everything full with renewables and come up with a decentralized storage solution. Plus, being dependent on Kazachstan for fissile material seems very... stupid?
