this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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But we could have worked on these issues for years by now. Abandoning the entire industry also lead to slowdown in research and inovation in the field. Of course now we're hopelessly behind.
Oor the ressources could be better spent in renewables, which are available as long as the sun exists, while nuclear will run out of fuel within the 22cnd century.
Also with nuclear Europe is entirely dependent on imports, primarily from Russia and russia-aligned countries. Being pro nuclear in Europe means being pro Putin.
Nuclear won't run out of fuel. But if renewable are so good, why are so many countries mining coal?
Oor we can do both so that in the middle of winter when there's only 6 hrs of sun (less when cloudy) we can still have electricity without ridiculously sized batteries.
Also uranium is so energy dense it can be mined and refined in Canada or Australia and shipped so, so very easily.
False information. There is enough fissionable material to last humans 10s of thousands of years.
Do you all have a source for that?
https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
Several other studies estimate 90 thousand years. All of this is Uranium alone.
I don't think I buy it. Like, there is a lot of uranium around the world, but most of it is prohibitively expensive to mine, the mining itself is extremely destructive, Australia has the largest uranium reserves but most of the rest is in the hands of authoritarian fuckwits like China and Russia, society's collapsing into wars and suffering climate catastrophes around the world so the safety of nuclear plants is increasingly in doubt, it takes decades to build them...
Honestly, if we're gonna spend decades on clean energy megaprojects, wouldn't it be better to go with something like a space solar power station which is a lot safer and the rectennas on the surface a lot easier to fix and replace?
You think mining for solar panels is free or something?
Out in space, it'll unironically be exponentially cheaper both financially and in terms of he environmental damage caused by surface mining as the decade goes on. We actually could get a lot of material to make mirrors to bounce sunlight around from lunar regolith, and where you have mirrors and a liquid to heat up, like water, you have a solar thermal generator, and up in space, that kind of a generator can provide endless amounts of power.
I feel it'd be a better investment than nuclear and all of its political problems.
Australia and Canada both have very large amounts of nuclear fuel that are currently unused because of short-sighted comments like this.
Uranium city is coming back baby!
And the feddit.de misinformation brigade has arrived.
I am quite sure i know a thing or two about politics that happened during my lifetime and i actively followed. Also i used to be a proponent for nuclear power when i was younger. But unlike the nuclear shills i am willing to accept when a technology is inferior and risky.
Funny, so do I.
Anyway, believe that "being pro nuclear in Europe means being pro Putin" or what ever absurd things you come up with.
I was here to give my response to OPs question. Discussing energy politics with the average German is as pointless as discussing biology with an anti-vaxxer and I have no interest in it.
Which is why you immediate derail the conversation by making ad himinen attacks, instead of interacting with the arguments... No suprise you cannot discuss things, because you don't want a discussion in the first place.
It's been discussed to death, check the most recent thread about Scholz's comment on [email protected] if you want to read through all of the discussion AGAIN.
But you are right. I'm not willing to have a discussion about it with you. Just like I wouldn't want to have a discussion about astronomy with a flat earther.
Your "nuclear = support russia" comment made it very clear where you stand on the issue and on what basis. So discussion is entirly pointless.
But it wasn't really meant as a personal attack against you, if that comforts you. It's a systematic problem, just like my other comparisons.
what was that Scholz's comment thread again? The community doesn't list anything from Scholz for me.
https://feddit.ch/post/797652?scrollToComments=true
Germany was importing most of its uranium from Kazachstan through Russia. Even during the war and sanctions on other energy ressources taking effect, uranium was shipped, so the plants could keep running. Making our energy dependent on Russia, or trying to keep up the dependency, be it gas or uranium is heavily peddled by pro Putin shills. Funnily those are also often anti vaxxers and other consipracy theorists thanks to russian disinformation. So yes, peddling for more nuclear power remains peddling for Putin.
Or you could just make deals with Canada or Australia instead.
The Russian supply problem is a very badly made up stawman if you think about it for more than 15 seconds.
Sure, the Canadians just clap twice and the mines put out triple the Uranium they did before. It doesnt take years to expand mines or anything. Also the other sources in Niger or Mali are not at risk of needing replacement, since the region is super stable.. Oh wait shit, that supply is also at risk since there was a coup in Niger just 6 weeks ago.
Why are you pro-coal?
i am pro renewables. It is the pro nuclear faction that tends to be pro coal too, just that they pretend they aren't. But it is the same businesses, the same industries and the same lobbying against renewables that unit pro coal and pro nuclear.
If you are anti-nuclear you are pro-fossil fuels. 100% renewables is a pipedream that is pushed by the energy companies amongst sports ads with scenic pictures of windmills in the background, while you ignore the other 44% of energy generation.
It is perfectly possible and necessary to go 100% renewables, interlocking sectors with systems such as hydrogen generation and physical and chemical power storages. But what do i know. I only studied energy systems.
Meanwhile nuclear power is a threat to energy security, as less stable water supplies in the rivers the plants cool from forces them to lower energy output or even shut down fully, because there isn't enough water to cool them anymore.
They're not wrong, I think initial estimates was 500 years, but that will change as more reactors get built.
That is indeed very wrong. With extracing Uranium from sea water and recycing fuel in breeder reacots, this goes up to like 90.000 years. And that's just Uranium, other fuels can be explored.
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as that. Theoretically, if everyone was using state-of-the-art designs of fast-breeder reactors, we could have up to 300,000 years of fuel. However, those designs are complicated and extremely expensive to build and operate. The finances just don't make it viable with current technology; they would have to run at a huge financial loss.
As for Uranium for sea-water -- this too is possible, but has rapidly diminishing returns that make it financially unviable quite rapidly. As Uranium is extracted and removed from the oceans, exponentially more sea-water must be processed to continue extracting Uranium at the same rate. This gets infeasible pretty quickly. Estimates are that it would become economically unviable within 30 years.
Realistically, with current technology we have about 80-100 years of viable nuclear fuel at current consumption rates. If everyone was using nuclear right now, we would fully deplete all viable uranium reserves in about 5 years. A huge amount of research and development will be required to extend this further, and to make new more efficient reactor designs economically viable. (Or ditch capitalism and do it anyway -- good luck with that!)
Personally, I would rather this investment (or at least a large chunk of it) be spent on renewables, energy storage and distribution, before fusion, with fission nuclear as a stop-gap until other cleaner, safer technologies can take over. (Current energy usage would require running about 15000 reactors globally, and with historical accident rates, that's about one major nuclear disaster every month). Renewables are simpler, safer, and proven ,and the technology is more-or-less already here. Solving the storage and distribution problem is simpler than building safe and economical fast-breeder reactors, or viable fusion power. We have almost all the technology we need to make this work right now, we mostly just lack infrastructure and the will to do it.
I'm not anti-nuclear, nor am I saying there's no place for nuclear, and I think there should be more funding for nuclear research, but the boring obvious solution is to invest heavily in renewables, with nuclear as a backup and/or future option. Maybe one day nuclear will progress to the point where it makes more sound sense to go all in on, say fusion, or super-efficient fast-breeders, etc. but at the moment, it's basically science fiction. I don't think it's a sound strategy to bank on nuclear right now, although we should definitely continue to develop it. Maybe if we had continued investing in it at the same rate for the last 50 years it might be more viable -- but we didn't.
Source for estimates: "Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?", Prof. D. Abbott, Proceedings of the IEEE. It's an older article, but nuclear technology has been pretty much stagnant since it was published.
If you are making a cost argument against nuclear energy, then you are supporting coal. If you are positioning renewables against nuclear, then you are supporting coal. Stop supporting coal and other fossil fuels. People like you have been hampering clean energy for 50+ years and are responsible for the fact that the world is burning more coal then ever before. Stop being a shill for coal.
No, I'm not. Saying Solution B is economically more feasible than Solution C is not an argument in favour of Solution A, even if A is cheaper than B or C. Because cost argument is not the only factor.
Had you actually read my comment, you'd see I'm pro-nuclear, and even more pro-renewables.
Why don't you check your own biases and preconceptions for a second and read what I actually wrote instead of what you think I wrote. I could just as easily call you an anti-renewable shill for nuclear pollution, using precisely the same argument you used. It's not valid.
Hint: if you ever find yourself arguing with "people like you..." -- you've lost the argument. Try dropping the right-wing knee-jerk rhetoric and start thinking.