do not let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough”
edit: quick addendum, I really cannot stress this enough, everyone who says nuclear is an imperfect solution and just kicks the can down the road – yes, it does, it kicks it a couple thousand years away as opposed to within the next hundred years. We can use all that time to perfect solar and wind, but unless we get really lucky and get everyone on board with solar and wind right now, the next best thing we can hope for is more time.
Good!
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
It also doesn’t help that people got brainwashed that solar energy and heat pumps will solve all our problems. I don’t have enough space to install so many solar panels to provide power to heat pump during the Eastern European winter and even if I did, ROI will be longer than their expected lifetime. And we still use lead during production, and no one wants to recycle them. These geniuses here import broken solar panels and dump them into the ground and cover them, call that recycling. FFS, nuclear waste disposal is less scary than this uncontrolled shit.
Don’t you love it when you get heavily downvoted but no-one is brave enough to challenge your point of view?
I mostly agree with you. Solar is good if you own a house, with a roof and have thousands in disposable cash to invest, but that’s not most people.
Heat pumps can’t be run on your solar power alone and if your house isn’t well insulated, they can be extremely inefficient, ending up costing you substantially more than sticking with gas or oil. And that’s not getting in to the other short comings of heat pumps which I believe is a separate debate.
As many people in this thread have said, the best time to invest in nuclear was thirty years ago, but the next best time is now. Give us tonnes of cheap, carbon free electricity to throw in to a heat pump and then they make sense.
That usually happens when you call a lot of people brainwashed. I don’t engage with it anymore.
Did I call a lot of people brainwashed?
Is it hard to understand the context of my comment? It replies to your first paragraph.
imagine how much farther ahead we would be in safety and efficiency if it was made priority 50 years ago.
we still have whole swathes of people who think that because its not perfect now, it cant be perfected ever.
So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
I mean it’s not the companies operating the facilities we put our trust in, but the outside regulators whose job it is to ensure these facilities are safe and meet a certain standard. As well as the engineers and scientists that design these systems.
Nuclear power isn’t 100% safe or risk-free, but it’s hella effective and leaps and bounds better than fossil fuels. We can embrace nuclear, renewables and fossil free methods, or just continue burning the world.
Don’t push nuclear power like it’s the only option though.
Where I live we entirely provide energy from hydro power plants and nuclear energy is banned. We use no fossil fuels. We have a 35 year plan for future growth and it doesn’t include any fossil fuels. Nuclear power is just one of the options and it has many hurdles to implement, maintain and decommission.
Honestly, if you can, hydro is brilliant. Not many places can though — both because of geography and politics. Nuclear is better than a lot of the alternatives and shouldn’t be discounted.
And what do YOU know about radioactive waste disposal?
We can bury it in the ground and it will literally turn into lead. How are you doing with carbon emissions? Got a fix?
The worst nuclear disaster has led to 1,000sq miles of land being unsafe for human inhabitants.
Using fossil fuels for power is destroying of the entire planet.
It’s really not that complicated.
Except that powering the world with nuclear would require thousands of reactors and so much more disasters. This doesn’t even factor the space abandonned to store «normal» toxic materials.
This doesn’t even factor the space abandonned to store «normal» toxic materials.
You mean under ground from where it was dug out?
The plant itself, water inevitably getting in contact with wastes and leaking also.
Both sound terrible.
I don’t really want to pick the lessor of two evils when it comes to the energy.
By not picking, you are picking fossil fuels. Because we can’t fully replace everything with solar/wind yet, and fossil fuels are already being burned as we speak.
No, give me an option that doesn’t make a part of the world uninhabitable or increases climate change.
That just a stupid comparison and is there any reason why we can’t also do wind solar thermal hydro also? It’s fossil fuels or nuclear and that’s it?
Except that nuclear isn’t the only, or even the cheapest, alternative to fossil fuels.
The problem is its potential for harm. And I don’t mean meltdown. Storage is the problem that doesn’t seem to have strong solutions right now. And the potential for them to make a mistake and store the waste improperly is pretty catastrophic.
“Nuclear waste” sounds super scary, but most of it are things like tools and clothing, that have comparatively tiny amount of radioactivity. Sure it still needs to be stored properly, very little high level waste is actually generated.
You know what else is catastrophic? Fossil fuels and the impact they have on the climate. I’m not arguing that we should put all our eggs in one basket, but getting started and doing something to move away from the BS that is coal, gas, and oil is really something we should’ve prioritised fifty years ago. Instead they have us arguing whether we should go with hydroelectric, or put up with “ugly windmills” or “solar farms” or “dangerous nuclear plants.”
It’s all bullshit. Our world is literally on fire and no one seems to actually give a fuck. We have fantastic tools that could’ve halted the progress had we used them in time, but fifty years later we’re still arguing about this.
At this point I honestly hope we do burn. This is a filter mankind does not deserve to pass. We’re too evil to survive.
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
An electrician installing faulty wiring doesn’t render your home uninhabitable for a few thousand years.
So there’s one difference.
That’s why there are lots of regulations for things impacting life safety. With a nuclear power plant, you mitigate the disaster potential by having so many more people involved in the design and inspection processes.
The risk of an electrician installing faulty wiring in your home could be mitigated by having a third party inspector review the work. Now do that 1000x over and your risk of “politicians are paid off” is negligible.
You are saying, regulations will fix this? Politicians create the regulations, the fines, and enforcement.
Political parties are running on platforms of deregulation right now.
Regulations are actually generally created by regulatory bodies, which are usually non-political. For instance, the underwriter laboratory is the major appliance, building and electrical approval body in the United States.
In most countries, building codes and safety codes are created by industry specialists, people who have been in the industry as professionals for many decades and have practiced and been licensed in the field that they are riding the regulations for.
There’s a big difference between politicians who are passing these laws, and those writing them who are the regulatory bodies. Generally, as a politicians will simply adopt the codes as recommended by the professional licensing and certification bodies.
I suppose it will be the end of modern civilization if politicians decide to politicize electrical or building codes. Then we’ll be fucked for sure. We’ve seen that happen before with the Indiana pi bill.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
“The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat.”
The risks are lower in literally everything else…?
a wind mill going down and a nuclear plant blowing up have very different ramifications
Exactly, just like a windmill running and a nuclear power plant running have very different effects on the power grid. Hence why comparing them directly is often such a nonsense act.
The daft thing is that even if another Chernobyl happened (unlikely given superior technology and safety standards) it wouldn’t be anywhere near as damaging as climate change.
The radiation would only affect a small area of the planet not the whole world, and technically radiation doesn’t even cause climate damage. Chernobyl has plenty of trees and plenty of wildlife, it’s just unsuitable for human habitation.
The daft thing is that even if another Chernobyl happened (unlikely given superior technology and safety standards) it wouldn’t be anywhere near as damaging as climate change.
Here’s my favorite way to put it: because of trace radioactive elements found in coal ore, coal-fired power plants produce more radioactivity in normal operation than nuclear power plants have in their entire history, including meltdowns. And with coal, it just gets released straight into the environment without any attempt to contain it!
And that’s just radioactivity, not all the other emissions of coal plants.
That’s an oversimplification to the point that it is wrong. Nuclear power is not the only form of clean energy like that at all. It can not be scaled in this situation to save us, because it takes too long to build them.
It takes 6 years on a fast paced build. If we had started when we knew of the problem, we could have avoided some of the problem. It is the only energy source we can scale up in that way, however. Every other energy source takes longer for less yield with current technology.
If we had started, but we didn’t.
It is not the only source like that at all. It is way easier, cheaper, faster and sustainable to build windmills where the is constant wind, solar cells where there is a lot of sun, hydro where there is… Energy sources should be built depending on the locality so they complement each other.
This kind of talking in absolutes like some of you are doing is just plain wrong and it does disservice to advocacy for nuclear power.
If we stared when we knew of the problem
Sadly, humanity had other things to do :(
Yep. Fuck Putin.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
Mmmm I agreed with you until reading this. The 6th IPCC Assessment Report showed us that Wind + Solar + Battery Storage are still a safer bet for rolling out non-fossil fuel energy sources at the fastest rate we can launch them. Nuclear sadly still takes too long to build.
I think there is a space for advanced nuclear, though. Small Modular Reactors, Fast Breeders, and such should be encouraged going forward. The US (and I think UK) each have funds specifically designated to the development of advanced nuclear too.
But old nuclear will take too long to get a hold on emissions. I still think nuclear fits in a well-balanced energy portfolio, but not of the specific technology of the 1950s-1990s.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
I mean, Chernobyl is kind of an outdated example. Fukushima would be the more recent one to point at, or even Three Mile Island. Not particularly useful for your argument. Still, I think if people got educated about all 3 of those examples from history, they’ll come out convinced that nuclear is still a safe bet.
Problem is, like I said above, that conventional nuclear takes too damn long to build.
Ahh… no. New solar and wind generation can be spun up much faster than nuclear.
I don’t know natural disasters and war causing it to screw up also tends to worry people. Last time I checked wind and solar don’t create massive damage to the environment when destroyed.
That is factually false information. There are solid arguments to be made against nuclear energy.
https://isreview.org/issue/77/case-against-nuclear-power/index.html
Even if you discard everything else, this section seems particularly relevant:
The long lead times for construction that invalidate nuclear power as a way of mitigating climate change was a point recognized in 2009 by the body whose mission is to promote the use of nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “Nuclear power is not a near-term solution to the challenge of climate change,” writes Sharon Squassoni in the IAEA bulletin. “The need to immediately and dramatically reduce carbon emissions calls for approaches that can be implemented more quickly than building nuclear reactors.”
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315
Wealer from Berlin’s Technical University, along with numerous other energy experts, sees takes a different view.
“The contribution of nuclear energy is viewed too optimistically,” he said. “In reality, [power plant] construction times are too long and the costs too high to have a noticeable effect on climate change. It takes too long for nuclear energy to become available.”
Mycle Schneider, author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, agrees.
“Nuclear power plants are about four times as expensive as wind or solar, and take five times as long to build,” he said. “When you factor it all in, you’re looking at 15-to-20 years of lead time for a new nuclear plant.”
He pointed out that the world needed to get greenhouse gases under control within a decade. “And in the next 10 years, nuclear power won’t be able to make a significant contribution,” added Schneider.
“We should just go nuclear, renewables aren’t viable” is just the next step in the ever-retreating arguments of climate change denial. First climate change wasn’t real. Then it was real but not man-made. One of the popular tactics today is to push nuclear, because they know how effective it can be at winning over progressives to help with their delaying tactics.
So… climate change deniers want to delay action on climate change. So they push for nuclear because it has long lead times and that forestalls action?
Come on man. That’s a pretty ridiculous theory. Climate change deniers are out there yelling “drill baby drill” not going undercover as nuclear advocates.
because it has long lead times and that forestalls action
I won’t profess to know for sure what their reasoning is. I suspect it’s a bit of that, and also a bit of hope/expectation that the fossil fuel industry will be well-situated to pivot into nuclear in a way that they can’t as easily do with renewables. The more centralised nature and heavy reliance on large-scale resource extraction is very similar. But they actual explanation isn’t what’s important.
What’s important is the simple fact that the biggest climate change deniers are now trying to promote nuclear. If you want to refute the claim, you need to explain that better than I can.
- Example one.
- Example two. This is the one that was very widely reported about in the news, and which first twigged me to this conservative strategy.
- Example three.
I’m not very familiar with Australian politics or leaders so I can only go with what I see in those articles. First, I don’t see any climate change denial. I see a debate about renewables and nuclear
Why are conservatives against renewables:
They can’t meet our total energy needs.
Wind and solar products are predominantly made in China and conservatives don’t want to feed the Chinese economy or increase dependence (one thing I do know about AU is that Chinese influence is quite heavy and a cause of great concern there).
Why are conservatives pro-nuclear:
It provides baseload capacity that supports wind/solar where they are weak.
It has military applications.
It creates large infrastructure spending within AU and supports mining industry.
They believe it will rankle liberals.
Maybe you have a point that conservatives who are dead-set against renewables will throw nuclear into the conversation as a distraction which they know will not go anywhere. But as an outside observer who doesn’t have built up associations with these characters, I honestly just see rational inclusion of nuclear in the energy mix. This all seems healthy to me.
He’s completely right, and I don’t get why more people don’t see that. As an example, here in Denmark, the leader of the far right populist party is both the one saying climate change would be a good thing since it means warmer summer weather as well as constantly bringing up nuclear energy any single time someone starts talking about climate change. It’s honestly so transparent. I used to see the same thing all the time on Reddit, and now I guess it’s Lemmy’s turn for this shit.
Long lead times against nuclear have bee raised for the last 25 years, if we had just got on with it we would have the capacity by now. Just cause the lead time is in years doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.
Did you read the quote? 15-20 years, as in decades before 1 nuke plant is built. I agree in that politicians of the past should have led us to a more sustainable and resilient energy future, but we’re here now.
Advanced nuclear should still be 100% pursued to try to get those lead times down and to incorporate things like waste recycling, modularity, etc., but the lead time in decades absolutely means nuclear power might not be something worth doing.
The IPCC puts the next 10-20 years as the most important and perilous for getting a hold on climate change. If we wait for that long by not rolling out emission-free power sources, transit modes, or even carbon-free concrete, etc., then we might cross planetary boundaries that we can’t come back from.
Nuclear is a safe bet and bet worth pursuing. I would argue that, along with that source from the IAEA, old nuclear is note worth it.
How much concrete does it take to build a nuclear plant? Concrete production is currently 8% of global emissions, so if you have to scale up construction capacity 10x for the next decade, don’t you end up destroying the environment with concrete before they are even operational?
Great point. You need concrete for wind, solar, and li-ion battery storage too (including pumped hydro), but out of those I’d say pumped hydro is the only one that remotely compares in the amount of concrete needed for construction.
So purely looking at the emissions from materials needed to build these power sources, renewables have the edge due to less concrete. These emissions might show up elsewhere in raw material extraction like with silicon for solar, and then the rare earth metals needed for generators in wind, all the lithium/nickel/cobalt needed for batteries, etc., but I want to say that the Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) from places like the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the US or the International Energy Agency (IEA) worldwide have taken that into account and still show that renewables + storage are cheaper on a carbon basis compared to fossil fuels and nuclear.
The cool thing about concrete for renewables (excluding hydro dam) is only the very base pad needs to be virgin. You can make a lot of the rest of the base and fill material with down cycled concrete. So tearing down part of an old factory on land near the solar panels are? Crush it up and only move it a few miles over to where you need it. Rather than hauling that to a landfill where it sits forever, costing energy use to haul, and more energy use to bring the fill and other bade materials from a further destination.
As others pointed out, to build that many nuclear power plants that quickly would require 10x-ing the world’s construction capacity.
My counterpoint is that if we had “just got on with it” for solar, wind, and battery, we would have the capacity by now and the cost per kwh of that capacity would be approximately half as much as the same in nuclear. And we would have amortized the costs.
Long lead times, cost overruns, producing power at a higher price point than renewables, long run time needed to break even, even longer dismantling times and a still unsolved waste problem. Compared to renewables that we can build right now.
when is the best time to plant a tree? 30 years ago. When is the second best time? now.
Surely the second best time would have been 29 years ago
Don’t fuck this up for me bro
Thank you. The pro-nuclear bullshit from Reddit seems to be spilling over.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Power_Plant
the largest fission plant was literally working 5 years after construction started
fission plants are just more expensive now because we don’t make enough of them.
I guess safety standards changed but even wind power kills more people per watt than fission so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nuclear could’ve easily worked if people didn’t go full nimby in the past few decades
I totally agree that current nuclear power generation should be left running until we have enough green energy to pick up the slack, because it does provide clean and safe energy. However, I totally disagree on the scalability, for two main reasons:
-
Current nuclear power generation is non-renewable. It is somewhat unclear how much Uranium is available worldwide (for strategic reasons), but even at current production, supply issues have been known to happen. And it goes without saying that waiting to scale up some novel unproven or inexistent sustainable way of nuclear power production is out of the question, for time and safety reasons. Which brings me to point 2.
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We need clean, sustainable energy right now if we want to have any chance of fighting climate change. From start of planning of a new nuclear power plant to first power generation can take 15 or 20 years easily. Currently, about 10% of all electricity worldwide is produced by about 400 nuclear reactors, while around 15 new ones are under construction. So, to make any sort of reasonable impact, we would have to build to the tune of 2000 new reactors, pronto. To do that within 30 years, we’d have to increase our construction capacity 5 to 10 fold. Even if that were possible, which I strongly doubt, I would wager the safety and cost impacts would be totally unjustifiable. And we don’t even have 30 years anymore. That is to say nothing of regulatory checks and maintenance that would also have to be increased 5 fold.
So imho nuclear power as a solution to climate change is a non-starter, simply due to logistical and scaling reasons. And that is before we even talk about the very real dangers of nuclear power generation, which are of course not operational, but due to things like proliferation, terrorist attacks, war, and other unforseen disruptions through e.g. climate change, societal or governmental shifts, etc.
It is somewhat unclear how much Uranium is available worldwide (for strategic reasons), but even at current production, supply issues have been known to happen.
Nuclear fission using Uranium is not sustainable. If we expand current nuclear technologies to tackle climate change then we’d likely run out of Uranium by 2100. Nuclear fusion using Thorium might be sustainable, but it’s not yet a proven, scalable technology. And all of this is ignoring the long lead times, high costs, regulatory hurdles and nuclear weapon proliferation concerns that nuclear typically presents. It’d be great if nuclear was the magic bullet for climate change, but it just ain’t.
We’d run of our uranium that’s economical to extract using current technology and at current prices. All known mineral reserves could power the world on exclusively nuclear energy for several thousand years at least.
All known mineral reserves could power the world on exclusively nuclear energy for several thousand years at least.
You got a source for that? Because the one I linked says that we run out of known Uranium deposits by 2100 at current usage rates. Our known Uranium deposits run out mid-century if we use nuclear to follow the IEA Blue Map plan to reduce carbon emissions by 50%, and we run out of even speculated deposits by 2100 under that scenario. Where are you getting “several thousand years” from? Is Thorium part of the mineral reserves to which you’re referring?
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It’s crazy you got over a hundred down votes, most which are just anti nuclear reactions brainwashed into them by corporations who knew they could make more money off coal, and made nuclear out to be the enemy.
emphasis mine:
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.
First of all anti- #GMO stances are often derived from anti-Bayer-Monsanto stances. There is no transparency about whether Monsanto is in the supply chain of any given thing you buy, so boycotting GMO is as accurate as ethical consumers can get to boycotting Monsanto. It would either require pure ignorance or distaste for humanity to support that company with its pernicious history and intent to eventually take control over the world’s food supply.
Then there’s the anti-GMO-tech camp (which is what you had in mind). You have people who are anti-all-GMO and those who are anti-risky-GMO. It’s pure technological ignorance to regard all GMO equally safe or equally unsafe. GMO is an umbrella of many techniques. Some of those techniques are as low risk as cross-breeding in ways that can happens in nature. Other invasive techniques are extremely risky & experimental. You’re wiser if you separate the different GMO techniques and accept the low risk ones while condemning the foolishly risky approaches at the hands of a profit-driven corporation taking every shortcut they can get away with.
So in short:
- Boycott all U.S.-sourced GMO if you’re an ethical consumer. (note the EU produces GMO without Monsanto)
- Boycott just high-risk GMO techniques if you’re unethical but at least wise about the risks. (note this is somewhat impractical because you don’t have the transparency of knowing what technique was used)
- Boycott no GMO at all if you’re ignorant about risks & simultaneously unethical.
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax:
This sort of generalization is ignorance.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
Wrong, nuclear power plants takes a lot of time to start and nothing can scale up to infinite spending. The solution and cure to climate change is to stop endless consumerism, if you don’t do that society will keep demand yet another power plant to power up some useless shit
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
Long term nuclear is great…
But building new plants uses a shit ton of concrete. So we’re paying the carbon cost up front, and it can take years or even decades to break even.
So we can’t just spam build nuke plants right now to fix everything.
30 years ago that would have worked.
8 years to build, not 30. Instead we are building many many more coal and gas plants. What a terrific alternative. Fallacy of renewables without storage is done. It’s never going to happen.
Why go nuclear when renewable is so much cheaper, safer, future proof and less centralised?
Don’t get me wrong. Nuclear is better than coal and gas but it will not safe our way of life.
Just like the electric car is here to preserve the car industry not the planet, nuclear energy is still here to preserve the big energy players, not our environment.
Don’t get scared off by the N Word
Nuclear isn’t the monster it’s made out to be by oil and coal propagands.
Nuclear power is neither safe nor ecologically sustainable. The waste is immensely toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. The model is centralized so wealthy oligarchs own the power source and sell it to everyone else. Better to move toward distributed power generation that isn’t massively toxic. Greenpeace must stay anti-nuke.
If the Great Filter theory is correct, climate change will most likely be our Great Filter.
Our species is simply not equipped with the ability to deal with the problems it created. Many people can, but they’re not powerful to do anything, and there’s too many uneducated people for the masses to rise up about this problem.
We think so short term, it’s impossible for some people to think about the future and accept that we’ll need to change the way we live now so that we can keep living then. They’re hung up on Chernobyl because it was a big bang that killed lots of people at once and it was televised everywhere that has a society and TVs, but they are unable to see that in the long term coal and gas have killed and are still killing way more people than nuclear accidents, because it’s a process that’s continuous and kills people in indirect ways instead of a big blast.
I still don’t think it will be our great filter. It will be a filter. But not the end all/be all.
Coal has the same yearly death toll and chernobyl’s total death toll. 80,000.
This is the same problem/argument you have with the argument/perception of planes being unsafe.
In 2022 almost 43000 people died in “motor vehicle traffic crashes”. And yet many believe that Planes are much more dangerous to use than cars because hundreds of people die all at once in a Plane crash.
A Plane crash is automatically a sensation, something that doesn’t happen every day but a car accident happens every day but this isn’t reported as much because it is already a daily routine.
The same goes with the “Coal kills more than nuclear” argument which is even less likely to be grasped by the normal population.
I mean just look at the climate change denier who say “but it is snowing so climate change isn’t real” while at the same time complaining that each summer is so incredibly hot.
All of those things are so incredibly complex that the vast majority can’t understand and outright deny them because they read/heard somewhere that they actually can understand, that it is a hoax. I mean, I wouldn’t count myself to the people that understand climate change but I can understand that it will have a drastic impact on our lives if this goes on.
Apple and oranges. It’s unhealthy and unsafe to live near Chernobyl. It took nearly a decade for people to start moving back to Fukushima Prefecture after decontamination and subsides to lure people back.
The actual cost of a Nuclear disaster is incredibly costly.
It still requires mining, processing and it still produces waste, waste which has to sit at the site of the nuclear reactor or be transported across country to some other temporary site. To my knowledge there is still no permanent disposal site for nuclear waste in the United States.
It’s unhealthy and unsafe to live near Chernobyl.
I’m with you most of the way, but it’s also extremely unhealthy to live near a coal power plant. That’s why they keep building them in or next to neighborhoods where the residents are too poor to be able to effectively sue them for all the cancer and other nasty deaths.
holy crap a voice of reason, hopefully they listen. And hopefully she’s free to come scream at the climate activists here in the US too.
To those of you who propose 100% renewables + storage. In cases with no access to hydro power. How much energy storage do you need? How does it scale with production/consumption? What about a system with 100TWh yearly production/consumption?
EVs with VTG. Problem solved. More importantly, energy production (solar plus wind) and storage (batteries) are completely decentralized, which is a huge security improvement for the grid. It amazes me that a platform that is decentralized doesn’t beat the drum for the same for energy production and storage.
Is there any more in-depth analysis to show how many EVs would be needed to make this feasible, how this would work with time of day use of power from commutes vs generation from solar power, how long the grid could stay powered this way, impact on consumers range, etc? I think the concept seems simple at first but would it actually be resiliant relying on just EV batteries? A cloudy week could see everyone run out of power, for example.
I live less than 2 miles from the last remaining coal power station in England.
I would much rather have nuclear instead of a chimney chucking god knows what into the air (and subsequently into me) for my entire life.
Fun fact, coal plants produce more radiation into their environment than nuclear plants
Modern reactor designs are so damn safe it’s insane
If they are so damn safe why i can’t build one in my backyard?
Because the radioactive bits need to be handled by trained and trusted personnel because if those bits fall into the wrong hands they can be used for some horrible shit
I wonder what Greta’s take on nuclear is.
She’s probably going nuclear on Greenpeace.
Greta is very scientifically minded and rational, unlike how the media likes to portray her. They use the emotional sound bites and almost never show her referring to paper after paper.
I hate it that sometimes women are portrayed like that just because they’re women.
Neurotic men projecting their bullshit into other people.
For the love of everything, at least let’s stop decommissioning serviceable nuclear plants.
Looking at you, Germany…
My understanding is that they eventually become unserviceable as they age, because of mechanical/structular reasons, or because the costs of servicing them is so prohibitive that they are unserviceable economically.
That they definitely have a begin, middle, and end, life cycle.
Disproven by Russia. Maybe sometimes core is replaced because it uses unsafe design by current standards like in St. Petesburg.
For real, God forbid we keep the actual safe, clean nuclear plants running
Normally I’m not a “lesser of two evils” type, but nuclear is such an immensely lesser evil compared to coal and oil that it’s insane people are still against it.
I spoke with a far left friend of mine about this. His position essentially boiled down to the risk of a massive nuclear disaster outweighed the benefits. I said what about the known disastrous consequences of coal and oil? Didn’t really have a response to that. It doesn’t make sense to me. I’ll roll those dice and take the .00001% chance risk or whatever.
Yeah, nuclear is to fossil fuels as planes are to cars, safety wise. Sure it’s a huge deal when an accident occurs, but that’s because accidents are drastically more rare.
Nuclear is fantastic and would have been even more fantastic 30 years ago. But it’s 2023 and renewables are getting better every day. There’s just no real reason to not invest primarily in green energy sources, especially when the track record on nuclear waste management is abysmal. People will say “oh but the resources, oh but the storage, oh but the blah blah blah”. We act like these things can’t be done, but they are being done all over the place. While the US argues about whether solar is viable, China has almost produced more solar panels in a year than the US has ever produced. And they are planning to try and deliver to other countries with less productive capacity as well.
I love the nuclear waste storage argument. Wouldn’t it be grand if we could just stick it in the atmosphere like we do with coal and oil? Smh…
Especially when you start counting the number of people that have died either directly or indirectly from coal, oil and every fossil fuel.
If your extrapolate the data into the next hundred years … fossil fuels will have responsible for the deaths of billions.
Compared to nuclear energy … fossil fuels is killing us slowly and will kill us all if we don’t stop using them.
Wind and solar > nuclear > fossil fuels
Nothing really against nuclear except how it is being weilded as a distraction from better, cleaner, energy. We need to be going all in on converting everything to wind and solar, with batteries and other power storage like water pumping facilities filling the gaps.
Nuclear needs a few more issues figured out, like how to actually cheaply build and get power from all those touted newer cleaner reactor styles.
There’s more toxic waste from solar panels each year than nuclear waste from all nuclear history. And this solar waste keeps snowballing at an insane rate. Because right now we’re dealing with waste from 20-30 years ago, when the amount of deployed solar panels was low. 20-30 years from now there will be no place to bury all that shit.
Citation needed.
As an example https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power
Please don’t repeat industry propaganda talking points. That “fact” is made up. It’s like the “Prius uses more energy than an F100” one - it comes from a company PR department, not reality.
That’s a fact. Propaganda is “green renewable” bullshit.
Sorry to burst your bubble on wind and solar… The amount of fiberglass and resin waste of astounding. The concrete trashes that particular spot for many hundreds of years. There are piles of birds in many areas with wind. And then solar… Oof… Most of the chemicals come from China. The slave labor, child labor, and toxic waste at the mines and refineries is just mind boggling. There’s a huge amount of work to do before wind and solar can be good options for humanity and the environment.
Nuclear has made great strides. We just don’t see those advances in the US unless you’re on a modern nuclear ship in the engine room. Europe has amazing modern designs. So does japan.
Wow. What’s toxic here is your made up industry propaganda.
A lot of what you just said is not true, fully bullshit, so I’ll just ignore all that. Dead birds? Cmon. Are we going to tear down all the skyscrapers in the world because birds run into them? Are we going to stop the entire logging industry because it takes away bird’s nesting space? Don’t spout anti-green energy propaganda like you are worried about the birds, if you were really worried about them, you would be pro green energy
If you consider the peripheral waste involved in their production it is only fair to do the same for everything else, and when you do, solar and wind still win. And it’s only going to get better, we are refining and recycling the rare materials involved better and better every year. We are kindof in the golden age of solar power improvements.
I don’t think any of us should be making assumptions about how many birds/bats are being killed without looking up the numbers. At least back when I was in school and learning about windmills (a decade ago) there were concerns because wind farms were often located along migratory pathways for birds. And it’s not just ‘birds’ that die, it can be an important species within the trophic level that gets decimated, and then there are consequences of that felt within the food web. It’s not as bad as a city, but we’re talking about introducing something new into the environment, and people should talk about the potential issues. We should be able to have both sides arguments about this stuff, since we’re still likely to agree it’s the right choice to replace carbon plants.
If you were an ecologist it wouldn’t be so easy to claim others are ignorant when they bring up concerns about renewable energy harming the natural spaces they are introduced into.
Anti-nuclear people in here arguing about disasters that killed a few k people in 50 years. Also deeply worried about nuclear waste that won’t have an impact on humans for thousands of years, but ignoring climate change is having an impact and might end our way of life as we know it before 2100.
They’re bike-shedding and blocking a major stepping stone to a coal, petrol and gas free future for the sake of idealism.
The biggest enemy of the left is the left
They’re bike-shedding and blocking a major stepping stone to a coal, petrol and gas free future for the sake of idealism.
I really don’t get this “nuclear as stepping stone” argument. Nuclear power plants take up to ten years to build. Also (at least here in Germany) nuclear power was expensive as hell and was heavily subsidized.
We have technology to replace coal and gas: Wind, solar, geothermal, etc. Why bother with nuclear and the waste we can’t store properly…?
