this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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Give me an N!
N!
Give me a U!
U!
Give me a C!
C!
Give me an L!
L!
Give me an E!
E!
Give me an A!
A!
Give me an R!
R!
What does that make?
NUCLEAR!
Let the big tech pay for it.
Sure!
Please don't let venture capital get it's fingers around the power grid that can't possibly end well
Yes, cut them off from the grid. Let them fend for themselves.
A plant blew up one time due to being poorly mismanaged and an earthquake broke another one. Meanwhile nothing bad has ever happened in the history of non-nuclear power generation. /s
Ofc! Oil gas and coal ONLY burn when placed in a funace. Attempt to light it on fire anywhere else and it will know and refuse catch fire. Its a safety feature. /s
With nuclear, you cant reason with it! Thats why we have to keep the brightest minds around th facility, to trick it into stopping via reverse psycology. /s
Centralia became a portal to hell... and they are claimimg it's burning coal. SMH! /s
I never said that nothing bad has happened with nuclear power.
Nuclear disasters are local, the ongoing climate change disaster powered by coal plants (which let our a hell of a lot more radiation than nuclear plants) is global.
I'll take a local disaster any day over a global disaster
Nuclear plants cannot be built fast enough for the ever growing demands of "AI".
Those modular small scale reactors won't take long.
That’s a great theory, but remember they’re really not in use yet. Well see
I am not talking about expantion, I am talking about replacement
No.
Ok, then let's boil the planet despite having safe and working alternatives.
The problem isn't function or safety, it's cost. It isn't cost effective to build or renovate a nuclear plant compared to wind or solar. If you have one in good condition, it makes sense to let it run its lifetime, but it makes little sense to build new.
Well it's probably cheaper to keep coal plants running, if money is the metric we care about.
Standardization and modularity.
Yes, the first plant would be expensive, but the cost would drasticly go down once production gets under way.
Make the plant design modular as well, so if the plant it built next to water, it can use the water to discharge heat, and not need cooling towers.
This isn't a huge problem.
The problem is cost and time. Its all fine and dandy to say we just need to make it modular, but the required R&D for that will take many years and then you need to build up production capacity and actually install them.
If this were the 1990ties, I would agree, but it isn't, so let's please be realistic and focus on what can be done now, which isn't modular nuclear reactors.
All you achieve by focussing on nuclear is letting the coal plants run at least a decade longer, while we do have better and cheaper alternatives right now that just need to be installed.
I am not blind to the issues with developing nuclear power, but nothing good will come from just standing still.
Start small scale development of nuclear power today, we will never get rid of baseload, and solar/wind can't deal with it well enough, sure we could deply batteries and have solar/wind charge them up ahead of a still night, but batteries degrade, so you'll soon need to rebuild them.
The environmental movement psycosis around nuclear power has caused immesurable harm to the planet, and I am quite distrustful of their evaluations of nuclear energy.
Here is a very interesting documentary from BBC Horizon from 2006, it concerns our fear of radiation: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7pqwo8
I don't think it will be easy to restart nuclear energy construction, no, I know it will be dificult, but I don't think it will be as dificult as the environmental movement claims.
Battery technology is an extremely well developed field with already existing and currently under construction large production facilities. Battery degradation is also much less on an issue with stationary installations, both due to how they can distribute the load to avoid deep discharging and due to the fact that some drop in total capacity is less relevant. Furthermore, redox-flow batteries basically do not have this issue.
Its pointless to argue what-ifs, when renewables combined with grid level battery storage is the cheaper and more easily scalable solution. Nuclear is an outdated relic of the past, just let it die.
Untill I am satisfied that the new grid can deal with baseload I will not stop talking about nuclear power.
Nuclear power in its current form is actively detrimental to grid stability, as it is produced in a few central locations and can not be realistically up and down regulated.
The newly installed decentralised grid batteries in California have just proven that this model works much better.
New nuclear plants can be regulated without problems. Old nuclear plants weren't designated that way, although they can be improved to be able to do it, but this isn't usually done as old plants will most likely be shutdown in the short term and investors don't want to spend any money in them.
No, hypothetical new modular plants might be better at regulation, but the recently build and still under construction ones are not.
No, already existing nuclear plants can regulate, as it's needed for places with lots of nuclear power like France.
https://www.powermag.com/flexible-operation-of-nuclear-power-plants-ramps-up/
As the article you linked also states, this feature is largely theoretical and for operational and economic reasons utility companies do not use it unless forced to. In France specifically, the high percentage of nuclear power makes it look like you can regulate it quite well, but that is an artifact of looking at total numbers that does not transfer to other grid situations where nuclear is only a small percentage of the overall production capacity. Generally speaking, nuclear and renewables are a bad match, and if you have to chose between them, renewables clearly win on both economics and scalability.
Sure, highly theorical:
Of course they don't use it unless force to, as the article states it's cheaper to ramp down fossil fuels than nuclear. And this is a benefit, not a problem. But its also cheaper to ramp down nuclear than renewables, and this is also a benefit.
Nuclear and renewables are a better match than fossil and renewables, and right now we are doing fossil and renewables. We've been decades asking for no nuclear in the hopes of getting only renewables and we've gotten fossil and renewables.
This study says otherwise: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544223015980
As long we don't have a way to deal with the nuclear waste, nuclear is not safe.
And even if we had a way to deal with this, Mining, preprocessing, building the reactor, running the reactor and treating the waste has to be cheaper than renewabls, which I doubt.
Last, but not least, building such powerplants takes years, if not decades, to build, which we don't have. At the current rate of emission, we have less than 6 years left before we miss the 1.5°C target[1], which is way to short for any nuclear facility.
[1] https://www.mcc-berlin.net/en/research/co2-budget.html
Nuclear waste is a solved problem.
Dig a deep hole, put the nuclear waste in the hole, backfill with clay.
Solved.
Now I understand that different places on earth have less suitable bedrock for this storage, so I voulenteer my home municipality in Sweden as a global storage site, we have stable bedrock, the technical skill and a stable government.
As for the "we don't have time" bullshit, I have heard that for more than ten years, it is pure bullshit, the best time to build nuclear power was ten years ago, the second best time is today.
You can yell about solar/wind as much as you ever want, but they can't deal with the baseload as well as nuclear or coal can, coal is buring the entire planet, nuclear MIGHT at worst create a temporary inconvenience where a relatively small area has to be closed to humans. Continued use of coal will cause far, far worse harm.
Your language is rude. Please adress your point in a more formal way, without claiming that I would be yelling or bullshitting.
I still don't see the deposition of nuclear waste as straight forward as you claim. We have accumulated waste for many decades and, so far, have establiahed only a single site. If this was new technology I would give it the benefit of the doubt, but we have decaying castors, wich will become more and more difficult to handle, as the fule rods become brittle. Just building new Reactors and think we will handle the waste eventually, is not enough to convince me.
If we had the resources to build nuclear powerplants and renewables, we should do both, but we have not. Thus, every Cent spent on nuclear is not spent on renewables which give more power per invested money.[1]
Baseload: The grids might not yet handle a widespread dunkelflaute, but they can be, and currently are, extended to shift energy from production places to the regions where they are needed. Furthermore the cost of energy storage is falling every every year[2], while the the cost of nuclear remains more or less stagnant.[3]
I agree that coal does more harm than nuclear, but as states above, we should put our effort in renewables.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2024/may/24/nuclear-power-australia-liberal-coalition-peter-dutton-cost
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184754/cost-of-nuclear-electricity-production-in-the-us-since-2000/
Sorry for being rude, I have just heard the same arguments over and over and over, and I am getting tired of them.
The reason as to why we haven't built more storage sites is our fear, our fear of radiation, most people don't understand how radiation works and have seen horrible photos and videos from Chernobyl and think that it is impossible to go there still.
It is the nimby crowd who has messed it up so completely.
Add to that the odd report about how to prevent future humans from the waste sites, something not needed, which plays on the fears.
I agree that fear and NIMBYs are one key issue that hinders us into progressing into a green future. Although we may not agree how to proceed best, it is important that we take quick and large steps, and stay united against continuing the emissions of CO2.
Thanks for the discussion :)
You are very welcome, thank you for putting up with me!
Sure, for nuclear to help not reach the 1.5°C threshold it should have been built decades ago.
For nuclear to help not reach the 2°C threshold it can be built now. But surely in a few decades it will also take too long to build.
Right now there are new fossil fuel plants being built, I think nuclear is a better alternative than that.
If we had to decide between nuclear and coal, the clear winner is nuclear. As I stated in the other comment that renewables are more cost effective than nuclear, and thus, we can convert more coal to emission free energy than with nuclear.
As I've stated fossil fuel plants are being built right now. I just say that we should build nuclear instead of fossil, not nuclear instead of renewables.
Clearly we can all agree there should not be fossil fuel power plants being built.
We need all the clean energy solutions and we need to build them much faster. I’m not optimistic about nuclear because it is by far the most expensive and time consuming to build out: we need to make a difference sooner than possible fr nuclear to help. But by all means, let’s give it a try: if we can get past this crisis, there will always be increasing energy needs ….. as long as we stop fossil fuels, and are going gangbusters with renewables
Should i nuclear or should i coal now?
If i coal there will be trouble.
And if i nuclear it will be double.
What?
Coal is far, far, far worse than nuclear, even in terms in radiation.
If we replaced all coal plants with nuclear power we would hugely reduce the ammount of Co2 and radiation released.
I meant in terms of if an accident happens.
On all other points i agree completely.
If an accident happens, it won't be the end of the world, at worst a relatively limited area will need to be closed to humans for a temporary time.
Globally it is not a big deal, compare that to cooking the entrie planet, I'd gladly take a few more exclusion zones if that enavled us to get rid of all coal plants.
There is also another point to this, nature is thriving in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.