The number of people who still think nuclear is bad and solar / wind will make up for it is really depressing. We could have had an unrivaled nuclear power infrastructure but those NIMBY assholes stopped it 50 years ago and now we rely on extending existing plants past their lifetimes while running in fucking circles about how to save the planet. Has anyone who wants to “go green” without nuclear ever looked at the power output of these things?? It’s not even the same league! AaagggghHhHhhhhhhhh
I’ll be a source. I worked at Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in MD for over 10 years. Because of the trend of shutting down nuclear, I shifted over to operating a combined cycle power plant. Calvert with 2 units did about 1800MW combined, base loaded 24/7 except for outages, and those were staggered so that when one went down for maintenance and refueling, the other unit was still throwing 900MW to the grid. My current plant has 2 gas engine turbines and 1 STG, and on a good day when we’re fully up 2x1 with ducts in, we can hit about 800MW when it’s called for. Balls to the wall in perfect conditions on a plant that’s not even ten years old, we can’t do half of what Calvert was doing and they’ve been operating since the 70s.
Imagine what modern nuclear tech could do. We should’ve been a step ahead of everybody with this.
Thanks for this. I did ask OP for sources, in other words links to verifiable data to back up the assertion that:
“Has anyone who wants to “go green” without nuclear ever looked at the power output of these things?? It’s not even the same league! AaagggghHhHhhhhhhhh”
Do you have any opinions on light water SMR designs? Do you think the idea to mass produce them and distribute these smaller reactors on a local basis is feasible, or do you think if they are mass produced we would be more likely to see them clustered in series in more modern plants?
The number of people who still think nuclear power is a manageable risk in any capacity is really depressing. We still have no idea what to do with all the nuclear waste we’re creating even now. And that’s not even considering the impact of having a nuclear plant when you’re in a war.
the impact of having a nuclear plant when you’re in a war
Ukraine seems to be fine, beyond Russians digging up their own fuck up dirt from the past to dig trenches
“Ukraine seems to be fine” is an odd thing to say considering what is going on there in general, but to your point, we can be glad that the fighting around Chernobyl did not do more damage. There’s also a difference in strategy when a country attacks their neighbour to annex their land. If they instead want to mess with a country further away, they can just drop some bombs on their nuclear plants and see what happens.
The entire French nation begs to differ. Look at that map! Power generation alllll over the country, not tucked in an unpopulated area or clustered in one spot ‘just in case’.
Then look across the border at Germany. The CND and Greens did a number on then generations ago, and Russia has kept up the fear over nuclear so they were able to keep Germany dependent on Gazprom. Until Ukraine.
The article says nothing about waste.
Russia is the biggest exporter of Uranium.
I have no idea what the CND in Germany is supposed to be and neither has Google.
France had to repeatedly power down nuclear plants and buy electricity from neighbours because they couldn’t cool their plants. Because there was so much drought in Europe there wasn’t enough water. A phenomenon that will surely never happen again in Western Europe in the next couple of decades.
The vast majority of “nuclear waste” is just common items that have come into contact with radiation. The really radioactive portions can be, and are safely stored within the facilities themselves.
Sure, the barely radioactive waste components do need to be buried (or it seems like that’s the current trend), but they pose no risk to anyone as long as they’re not digging them up.
And for how long to they have to be “safely stored”? For how long do they have to be buried without anyone digging them up? And where are we burying anyway where there is no risk of anyone digging them up intentionally or accidentally, no risk of natural phenomena interfering, no risk of the barrels breaking and nuclear waste seeping into our water? There is a reason why countries have been struggling to find these safe storage spaces for decades. I’d argue that is because there aren’t any.
I don’t think nuclear power was killed by NIMBYs, at least not entirely. In the 1970s and 80s the financial world started taking a much more short-term view. Nuclear power plants have such a huge up-front cost that you aren’t going to see returns for decades. When the market wants numbers to go up every quarter they’re not going to finance something that won’t make a profit for 20 years.
The problems with nuclear power aren’t meltdowns, but the facts that it often takes decades just to construct a new plant, it creates an enormous carbon footprint before you get it running, it has an enormously resource-intensive fuel production process, it contributes to nuclear proliferation, it creates indefinitely harmful waste, and even if we get past all of that and do expand it, that’s just going to deplete remaining fuel sources faster, of which we only have so many decades left.
It’s not a good long term solution. I agree we should keep working plants running, but we can’t do that forever, and we still need renewable alternatives - wind, hydro and solar.
And it wasn’t some nebulous group of NIMBYs that worked against nuclear power, it was the fossil fuel lobby. I don’t know why people keep jumping to cultural explanations for what is clearly a structural issue. The problem isn’t some public perception issue, but political will, and that tends to be bought by the fossil fuel lobby.
Also there is good science on why we actually can switch to entirely renewables: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/23/no-miracles-needed-prof-mark-jacobson-on-how-wind-sun-and-water-can-power-the-world
Re: Remaining fuel.
If we built breeder reactors we could use the spent waste fuel to power the entire US for 1000 years. That runs into plutonium existence problems, but it’s a political problem, not a resource problem.
However, I still agree with what you’ve said. We should limit our nuclear footprint to key isotope production, but we really shouldn’t be doing that until we’ve gone full carbon neutral.
Edit: In case you can’t see the reply to this comment, my conversation partner has given me more information I didn’t have before. Breeder reactors are neat, but they have more issues than I originally knew. (Still a badass concept though :P) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2968/066003007
The important part here is “if we built”. If we built a net-gain fusion reactor our energy problems would be solved too, but we’re not doing that.
There are significant problems with breeder reactors and development has largely stopped on them.
The problem here is the AM/FM distinction: Actual Machines vs Fucking Magic.
Fucking Magic is great if you’re writing scifi, or trying to sell snake oil to investors. The Hyperloop and FSD are examples of Fucking Magic. Sure, they could, in theory, exist, but they don’t, and we don’t know how long they would take or even if they make sense in the long term.
There’s nothing wrong with working on new technologies that may as well be Fucking Magic until they do become viable.
However, if you are making plans for how to proceed with your policy goals, you need Actual Machines. Actual Machines can’t do miracles and fix all of our problems overnight like Fucking Magic can, but they have the benefit of existing. We know their actual benefits and their actual drawbacks. We know that they won’t present some brand new problem that makes them impossible to work with, because they are mature. Trains and bicycles are Actual Machines. Wind, solar and hydro power are Actual Machines.
Cars are also Actual Machines, and thanks to over a century of maturity, we can confidently say that they are not sustainable at their current scale. Nuclear fission is similar.
We don’t know if Fucking Magic will make the transition to an Actual Machine, and if it does, whether it will turn out to be viable.
If breeder reactors are going to become a technology we can rely on to solve our nuclear fuel and waste issues, then they need to make the transition from Fucking Magic to Actual Machines to finally being viable, and that could take decades or more of further research, and yet more decades to actually build the things. Sure, that could come in time to extend our nuclear fuel reserves before they run out in around a century, but it might not. We just don’t know. It certainly won’t come in time to make a difference to climate change.
While those are all fair points, it’s also important to note that Gen IV reactor technology has projected generation efficiencies of very roughly 100-300x the energy yield from an identical mass of fissile material when compared to Gen II and Gen III reactors. I dare say that would change the efficiency equation rather significantly if those numbers pan out in the implementation stage.
The problem with nuclear is it gives fossil fuel giants a free pass to try speedrun killing the planet before it even arrives.
If we plan for nuclear, we plan to do nothing for 50 years.
I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Nuclear displaces fossil fuels at a better rate than renewables and is just as low carbon impact as them. We could replace the entire fossil grid with nuclear in 10 years if there was public support and demand for it, but fossil giants have been parroting the same antinuclear myths and fears dor the last 70 years and its so widely spread even pro renewable people have been deluded into thinking nuclear is bad for the planet when it might very well be our last best hope of fixing greenhouse emissions without the entire world reverting to pre industrial lifestyles.
Nope, we will be burning the fossil fuels the whole time the nuclear plant is being built.
That’s why fossil fuel giants and right wingers are banking on nuclear, because it’ll be a free pass to burn burn burn.
I think nuclear and fossil fuel people all the same people. Its all energy investors. Nuclear would come with a lifetime storage contract with the ability to continually jack up the public cost indefinitely as the requirements change. Seems like an industry that would appeal to the fossils fuel types.
I don’t understand why individuals are so set on centralized generation. We suddenly have the capabilities to decentralize generation and greatly reduce the need for the grid. I think it is worth it for the aesthetic advantages alone.
My opinion is that to be truly decentralized we should do both. Not just physically decentralize by location, but decentralized in a sense of having multiple options. We should do solar, and wind, and nuclear power. The power output of solar and wind is just not where it needs to be to replace both nuclear and fossil fuels, so I do have to argue in favor of building more nuclear power, but that doesn’t mean I am against building any other renewables as well.
