This is a (slightly older) article about Nuclear Energy and climate change. It’s a hottly debated topic in climate communities, so I thought some of you would enjoy to read it.
Another article that brings up some more points against nuclear power can be found here.
I’d be interested what you ppl think of the matter.
What about the newly conceived thorium reactors that use the nuclear “waste” (spent fuel) to create energy? I think nuclear as we know it might be out of date,but that doesn’t mean the technology can’tcontinued to develop in new and better ways.
I’d say they are not yet commercially usable on a big scale, but then again the same has to be said about battery usage for renewables.
The again, both areas need money and funding and I think it would be better directed towards storage solutions, because they don’t come with the downsides of Nuclear. I have to admit tough that I am not well read about thorium rector, so if there are flaws in this view by all means point them out.
People are going to have to get used to the idea that nuclear is part of the solution to getting rid of fossil fuels.
Because we cannot store power from intermittent sources efficiently. You need a strong baseline, which, right now is only achievable with fossil energies or nuclear power. There is literally no other option right now to get rid of fossil fuels than nuclear, not until we find an efficient way of storing energy, and even then it will still probably be needed.
But the demand is far from constant and nuclear likes constant , it has a very hard time regulating up and down quickly to follow the changes in demand. Solar and wind can by switched on and off near instant or even act as short term buffer in the case of wind to stabilise the grid
I am not an expert, nor do I love nuclear power. But as I understand it with renewables we need to solve the storage problem. Wind and solar intermittent, and battery options are terrible in efficacy, cost, and environmental impact. Plus the north american grid is old and built around power being always-on - there isn’t (yet) the ability to shuffle power from areas with to areas without to the scale we’d need.
So I have a feeling that despite all these issues nuclear will be part of the solution. Lucikly it’s so expensive and has such low public opinion that I doubt governments will go “all-in” on nuclear any time soon.
All of these issues can be mitigated to the point where they’re unproblematic, they just generally won’t be or are skipped because it’s deemed unprofitable. It’s also funny seeing yet another sad nuclear hit piece from a gas lobbyist.
Building coal power plants is so much better.
