First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia::ATLANTA — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.
Good news. Anything but fossil fuels at this point.
The reduced operating emissions take 10+ years to outweigh the enormous construction emissions of nuclear. (Compared to gas.)
Sure. But do you think Nuclear reactors will still be cheaper than renewables + storage in the 2070s? Nuclear is far more expensive per kWh than renewables, and the cost of storage is falling fast.
I literally studied this exact nuclear design at University - the Westinghouse AP1000. You can look up the WNISR (World Nuclear Industry Status Report) if you don’t want to take my word for it.
Don’t forget, mining and enriching uranium still has a significant carbon footprint, far higher per tonne than any fossil fuel. Yes, it’s lower over time, but we need to be reducing emissions now, not in 50 years time.
So you’re saying the construction effort requires at least a decade of nuclear powered energy to be achieved?
That could be up to 3.652 TWh. That’s more than my entire nation consumes in three years and we’re one of the world’s biggest suppliers of natural resources, including nuclear.
You’re mathing wrong.
Nuclear is still fossil fuel, just not combustion. But I agree, this is good news because it helps reduce coal and gas usage.
Edit: I get it, I’m wrong. No need to repeat the same comments over and over.
Nuclear is Non-renewable, but it’s not a Fossil fuel:
A hydrocarbon-based fuel, such as petroleum, coal, or natural gas, derived from living matter of a previous geologic time.
We have plenty of nuclear fuel and waste is a drop in an ocean compared to that of fossil fuels.
Ooh a lot of people here seem very pro-nuclear-power. That’s cool!
Unfortunately, there’s still that one guy in the comments trying to say that hypothetical, largely unproven solutions are better for baseload than something that’s worked for decades.
That or the fear-mongering talking points. That’s what caused our local power plant to be decommissioned, and now those same people are complaining about how much their electrics cost now.
The old soviet legacy. And a bit of actual disasters and from the 2 significant ones (hiroshima and chernobyl) half are beacuse of the soviets.
If you mean renewables by that, it’s hardly hypothetical or unproven. I’m in Australia and south Australia and Tasmania (two of our states) have fully renewable grids, Tasmania for the past 7 years. South Australia does still occasionally pull from an interconnect but most of the time they’re exporting a bunch of power.
Renewables with storage are cheaper and faster to build than nuclear and that’s from real world costs. Nuclear would be fine if it wasn’t so stupidly expensive.
Tasmania
Generates nearly all its power using hydro electric, which is great but pretty dependent on geography.
South Australia
Wiki says a pretty big hunk of that is still gas
In Ontario Canada where I am from it would take > 4000 wind turbines all working at once (not including the batteries) to supplant our nuclear capacity. Even the largest battery storage are in the hundreds of mega watts and only for a few hours at the cost of about half a billion dollars.
I think it is more productive to approach these technologies as complementary as any proper grid should have both for the near future if we want to reduce global warming.
South Australia is 70% renewables, as per their own official energy site.
Batteries are the limiting factor for renewables. Building battery storage that can supply a large city is expensive. Even the battery South Australia had Elon Musk build can only supply a town for about an hour. I’m hoping battery tech improves soon, but it seems to have stagnated for a while.
The nuclear lobby is alive and well on social media. Never before has the internet apparently agreed on something so controversial with some of the most cookie cutter, copy and paste, AI generated comments on the subject I’ve ever seen.
The talking points seem to gloss over the fact that nuclear storage always fails, meltdowns happen, and you still have to mine uranium out of the ground. It’s far from a clean source of energy.
That the “nuclear lobby” is paying people to post stuff on Lemmy, a social media platform that accounts for a small part of single percent of all social media users, is a hot take I haven’t heard yet. Congrats, you’ve definitely imagined a scenario that nobody else in history has ever thought of. A true original thought.
Pity it’s an absolutely fucking brain dead take masquerading as something more than nonsensical blithering from a total nincompoop, but you should bask in this moment nonetheless.
About damn time! As a Georgia Power ratepayer, I’ve only already been paying extra for it for what, around a decade now?
That’s the downside of nuclear. Cost and build time. Upside is it’s reliable and carbon-clean.
The best time to build a nuclear power plant was thirty years ago. The second best time is now.
This encapsulates the public response to building nuclear. I guess that is why it is the first in decades.
To be clear, my comment isn’t “the public response to building nuclear;” it’s “the public response to corruptly financing nuclear on the backs of ratepayers while guaranteeing zero-risk profit for shareholders, despite incredible incompetence and cost overruns building the thing.”
If you think that bullshit is inherent to building nuclear, I won’t dispute it, but I will say it makes you even more cynical than me!
I would’ve had no problem with it at all if it weren’t a fucking scam to gouge me for somebody else’s profit.
Whoa. Finally a state in the US that isn’t doing something completely ass backwards. We need more of this.
It’s Georgia, though. This is a positive development but it barely begins to make up for how much other ass-backwards stuff there is.
This is the state that elected Marjorie Taylor Greene, keep in mind.
A single congressional district within that state elected Marjorie Taylor Greene lol
I highly, highly recommend the Oliver Stone documentary Nuclear Now from earlier this year. Completely changed my perspective. I had no idea that the oil industry was behind so much of the fear mongering around nuclear.
To be fair we have seen multiple disasters in the past including Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima, which have serious and long lasting effects. I’m not against nuclear power but we can’t pretend the downsides are just made up or blown out of proportion.
They are sort of blown out of proportion when you take into account modern safety protocols.
Chernobyl and three mile island were user error, fukushima was force majeure.
Since then they’ve been piloted widely. France has about 50 reactors and a laundry list of smaller errors that we’ve since learned from.
Have you ever compared the impact of Fukushima compared to the tsunami that caused it?
Other than that, even if we assume rectors keep being old tech from the 60s, never using newer generations of rectors that can be inherently safe: Who cares about a bit of contaminated area, very localized, every few dozen years, when the alternative is a global climate crisis?
I’d agree if our only two options were nuclear or coal/oil plants but we have many options that don’t require everything be powered from centralized power plants.
Who cares about a bit of contaminated area, very localized, every few dozen years, when the alternative is a global climate crisis?
I’m sure all the people and companies that exist in these areas. Land is finite and hospitable land is even more finite. Destroying these areas for decades to come isn’t any more preferable that the occasional natural disaster rolling through over a few day period.
As I said I’m not against nuclear power and I would love to see more advancements come to fruition, but it doesn’t need to be our main source of energy nor is it accurate to claim that the potential issues that come with it are solely overblown conspiracy theories pushed by oil/coal companies.
More people died in the evacuation of Fukushima than died fighting the meltdown, which was arguably 1.
1 confirmed from radiation (lung cancer, 4 years later),[3] and 2,202 from evacuation.[4]
The tsunami killed over 15,000 people. Awful disaster.
However, Japanese people are very anti-nuclear so their media made it seem that the impact was horrific when, aside from the exclusion zone, wasn’t all THAT bad. However, losing that land was a big hit to a small country.
I mean, it’s obvious.
Also historically some of Soviet-friendly left would present “capitalist” nuclear energy as apocalyptic-level dangerous and related to nuclear weaponry etc (cause USSR was, after discovery of reserves, selling oil and gas just like Russia does now, actually that was the reason for Brezhnev’s time improvement in level of life and simultaneously rapid growth of corruption, also loss of hope of anything like the Thaw happening again).
Or, maybe people recognize that literally the majority of radioactive mining leaves irradiated lands that disproportionately effect minorities and oppressed communities. The Navajo are still suffering due to the mining of radioactives in their area. The same story is true for nearly every community near such facilities.
Ah, those activists wouldn’t talk about that mostly, they’d talk about boom and radioactive pollution in places their audience lived in.
Leftists caring about minorities and oppressed communities anyplace far from themselves are a notable rarity.
And since the replacements were coal, oil and gas, which are just as dirty, I’d say your argument isn’t worth shit.
