Nuclear power is great. How soon can you have it installed and add capacity?
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
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Going by history, in 20 to 60 years.
Thankfully, the nuclear pushers have mostly shut-up nowadays. Because the thing can't compete with renewables and probably can't be built before we almost run out of fossil fuels. It's a very expensive distraction.
(Oh also, it can't feed a grid without batteries or some dispatchable backup.)
But well, if somebody wants to invest their money in it, I'd say go for it!
Very soon. If we change the absolute clown decision under the Carter administration to not reuse nuclear waste we can just use the nuclear waste we've already built up, never burn another hydrocarbon, and never install a single additional solar panel (cause why not), and power the US for 150 years with relatively little mining.
Energy is solved. But neither party wants it to be solved. They want a problem they can have political gainsmanship over. Whether it is the Rs wanting wars to support a petro-dollar as an excuse to give their friends in the defense world money, or the Ds wanting tax funded projects for their donors. An actual solution offers no party any advantage over the current problem.
Most waste isn't spent fuel, it's tools and clothes and PPE and steel and other bits that have been directly exposed to radiation long enough to become radioactive.
I never claimed otherwise.
why not both?
Because nuclear is not good?
It pollutes … for a very long time, it costs a lot of money to build, run, decommission it, and it’s ridiculously slow to build.
And most importantly? It’s not needed. Green renewables are cheaper, quicker, and can store power to use at all hours.
It pollutes … for a very long time
Are you talking about the waste product? Because the amount of air pollution from nuclear is negligible.
Air pollution is not the issue with nuclear. The issue is the mining of the nuclear materials, the enrichment and the nuclear waste (spent fuel and equipment used in the whole process).
- I was interested so let's see -
Warning: numbers are only from light googling.
The world uses 25.000 TWh of electricity.
24.000Kg of Uranium per TWh nuclear.
600.000.000Kg of Uranium per year (if all nuclear).
At ~53cm3 per Kg that's 31.8 billion cm3 or 31.800m3.
I wanted to visualize.. so how many shipping containers is that. At 33m3 per container (TEU twenty ft equivalent unit) approx ~964 TEU containers... Actually less than I expected.
Sure, that’s why I was confused about the use of the word “pollution.” Even when it comes to water the issue is that the water that’s returned to the water source is warmer, not that it’s polluted.
How does mining for Uranium compare to mining of materials needed for solar and for battery cells, targeting the same energy output? My guess is that they’re fairly similar, but I haven’t done the research to confirm. I’d be very surprised if either got anywhere near the impact of mining for coal and oil (plus the resulting pollution from their use), though.
In terms of waste by volume, nuclear doesn’t generate nearly as much as coal. According to https://www.nei.org/news/2019/what-happens-nuclear-waste-us, a single coal plant generates more waste in an hour than the entirety of nuclear power has generated, total. And in the US, at least, we have a centralized location planned since 1987, but it has been blocked for political reasons.
Nuclear power can also be more efficient relative to the initial amount mined and can reduce fuel waste by recycling waste fuel, and even more by using breeder reactors, which generate roughly 140 times as much energy given the same amount of Uranium. Breeder reactors also do not have a need for the enrichment cycle and can be built to use Thorium instead of Uranium.
Just to clarify, I’m coming at this from a US perspective. The US doesn’t recycle waste fuel, but some other countries do. As far as I know, there are only two breeder reactors worldwide (both in Russia).
I’m not a diehard nuclear supporter or anything along those lines, but so far the reasons I’ve seen for why we aren’t investing in nuclear more are either political or economical (since so much of the cost is upfront and the pay-off takes place over the reactor’s entire lifespan).
Yes the waste.