Loads of people love to pretend an NPP is just a hut with a magic gem inside delivering an endless amount of power for free. In reality they are huge, highly complex, high-security facilities that take decades and billions to build and need to be operated and maintained by loads of highly trained staff in 24/7 shift operations. This isn’t to downplay their merit of providing CO2 emission free power, but for the love of god please appreciate the enormous effort and expense this is achieved with, especially when comparing it to renewables.
It’s almost like many things operate exactly like that but don’t have people spreading disinformation or fearmongering to the point where people are so pants shittingly terrified of them they won’t even consider it.
Yeah, fossil fuel companies have spent the last 70 years propagandizing against nuclear because it’s their largest threat.
Sure, but hopefully you have no trouble believing that simultaneously, nuclear power companies and governments wanting to use nuclear, despite the risks, have been propagandizing for nuclear.
Pro-nuclear folks are often completely unaccepting of there being risks and externalized costs, which feels to me like they’re subject to propaganda (notwithstanding that I’m likely subject to different propaganda).
Not quite. They initially did, but these days they fund the pro-nuclear groups more because it causes discussion between the pro-nuclear groups and the pro-renewables groups. This means nothing of substance really gets done. Moreover, they prefer nuclear over renewables because nuclear takes a lot longer to build. They don’t mind another 15-20 years of fossil fuels that a nuclear-heavy strategy gives them, whereas renewables can be deployed right now which hurts their bottom line more.
Things that don’t exist yet aren’t a solution for problems we have now.
It’s not like we could now just build a thorium reactor that makes economic sense without decades of serious prototyping. And by that time we might have found that there are more pbolems with it than we thought.
I mean, China is doing it right now, and we’ll have answers in a lot less than decades.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Operating-permit-issued-for-Chinese-molten-salt-re
Don’t forget about the environment cost of extracting unprocessed uranium ore.
Solar panels require a specific grade of silicone as a rare(ish) raw material input that requires extraction and heavy processing. Wind turbines don’t really use anything that is not readily available (steel, aluminum, fiber glass, etc.)
The technology to recycle solar panels still needs to be developed. The technology to recycle solar panel blades exists, but has not scaled up yet.
I’m not saying solar/wind have no material cost. I am saying the process for refining uranium requires extracting a lot of uranium ore.
That technology is nowhere near mature enough to provide a solution to the mentioned problems in the next decade or two.
Well of course not, now. I never said it would fix the now problems we face. Had we started in the 1950s, or even the 70s, the impact of climate change would have been negligible and likely mitigated entirely by changes to society that we can’t possibly speculate given our current world. Unfortunately, money and greed played yet another part in destroying our futures by those who won’t be around to see what they’ve done or simply don’t care.
Sure, let’s pay private corporation billions in subsidies by handling their waste and have more centralisied and expensive energy production. Oh and trade dependencies due to uranium
The most recent nuclear reactor built in the US bankrupted Westinghouse and is set to raise utility rates. Oh, and it’s $17 billion over budget and 7 years late.
Yep. Yet, Climate scientists still believe that we need to rely on a combination of nuclear and renewable energy in order to combat climate change. This tells me we’re bad at it, and we need to get better at building and maintaining nuclear plants.
Nuclear solves one of the biggest issues with renewables because the energy output can be adjusted.
This in turn means that you need less energy storage capacity in order to supplant existing technologies.
Honestly I’m just happy we’re moving away from fossil fuels.
They don’t think that. Take South Australia for example - it’s moving towards 100% renewables with the help of a mix of sources including battery storage. There’s no need for non-renewable nuclear energy in the mix.
Some of the smartest people in the world have been working for over half a century to get better. And yet it’s still getting more expensive to build them.
Maybe it’s just hard and a dead end. Like the paddlewheel or dirigibles. At the time they felt like the future but there were unforeseen problems in scaling them up to meet expectations, and we found better, safer ways of doing the same thing.
Small nuclear reactors seem to work pretty well. Using them for deep space or disaster response would make sense. Just park a Seawolf off the coast and hook it up to support the grid.
If we were talking about naval reactors you’d have a point.
But this is what I was talking about in another post: Maybe big reactors are a bad idea? Maybe there are issues with getting them to utility-scale that, like blimps, makes them the less ideal solution for most applications?
Hum… Try sorting it by price.
Is price the only concern? Seems like too narrow of a focus.
Maybe try sorting by “lifespan”, as nuclear facilities last 3-4x longer.
You could try sorting by “crude oil usage”, as each turbine needs 60 gallons of high synthetic oil to function, each needs an oil change every 6 months.
Would be interesting to sort by “birds killed” or “acres of habitat destroyed”
I’m not saying nuclear is necessarily better, that is a difficult calculation. But we got ourselves into this climate change disaster by short-sightedly “sorting by price”. Perhaps spending more money for a long term investment would be more wise than always going with the cheapest option.
I was going to shred you because nuclear plants also have turbines that rotate and need lubricant, but then I did a quick search and found an interesting article that interviewed someone from a nuclear power plant that claimed one oil change in 34 years. https://www.lubesngreases.com/magazine/15_5/lubricants-at-the-atomic-frontier/
Yeah, since there is no combustion there is no carbon deposition and thus the oil basically lasts forever. We just filter it and add occasionally to make up for leaks.
Try price/year instead of lifespan.
But yeah, you can go with crud oil usage, birds killed and acres of habitat destroyed too. Those won’t give you the result you are wanting to see.
It’s not that nuclear is useless. But it’s worse on almost every way. Yeah, that “almost” is important, but the meme is way out of line.
It’s not useless, and it’s most certainly not worse in almost all ways - enriching the fuel and construction time/costs are all that make it fall apart.
Nuclear can be built near pretty much any water source without tainting it at all, it generates a huge amount of power with very little land usage, it lasts for a long time.
If we had time, I’d be all in on nuclear - but it takes almost a decade of build time… We need solutions a hell of a lot faster than that or we’re all screwed anyways
The waste is worth the carbon emissions reduction.
If we could replace all our carbon emitting power with wind and solar today I would be in full support. But we can’t. Especially in parts of the world where solar doesn’t work half the year.
So I’ll take the waste surrounded by warnings burried in a hole over carbon emissions. Carbon emissions are much worse.
That’s so against reality that it’s funny.
Nuclear power is as cheap as the sky is green.
Nuclear powered wind farms, to combat natural cyclones with counter spinning cyclones intensively farmed
I vote we blow radioactive material around with giant fans. That should solve some of our energy problems.
