Aside from it being simply outdated and uneconomical, and given the community you are asking this in: there is an well studied argument that nuclear power is inherently authoritarian because of the necessary security requirements (and to a lesser extend centralisation of power production).
On the uneconomical aspect, this isn't really true. Yes, it's uneconomical to build an old reactor in the modern world. However, that's by design, not necessity. It isn't inherent to nuclear reactors that they are expensive.
They're expensive because of a bunch of hurdles we make them jump through that other sources of power get to skip. This is on purpose, to ensure they can't out-compete the existing energy companies that have all the money and power. As an example, no other power source has to account for all of its waste. Even renewables create waste they get to just ignore and let third-world countries deal with. The level of safety is also ridiculous, which raises costs. It's potentially safer than even many/most(/maybe all, if scaled properly) renewables.
As for outdated, I have no idea what this could even mean. Care to explain? There are new reactor designs. If you mean old designs are old then sure. If you mean the source of power itself does not function anymore, then that's absolutely insane.
Authoritarian? Sure, I guess. Our whole grid is the. As an Anarchist, sure, I'd prefer people to generate the power themselves. However, efficiencies of scale mean this isn't the best option short-term. We need to get off of dirty energy ASAP. Even solar benefits from scale. Kwh/$ is better on solar farms than an individual house. But also, micro-reactors are becoming a thing. They generate too much power for an individual house, but they do allow for localized power generation with nuclear.
I wish nuclear power operators had to accout for all their waste, but that isn't true at all. And the rest of you comment is equal levels of ignoring reality.
We need to get off of dirty energy ASAP.
Exactly, and nuclear energy is the opposite of that. It takes decades to build and those non-existing micro-reactors are the latest investor scam that make evel less economic and technical sense than regular sized reactors.
I wish nuclear power operators had to accout for all their waste, but that isn't true at all. And the rest of you comment is equal levels of ignoring reality.
What do you mean? What waste isn't accounted for? Do you mean water vapor? That's the only thing you could mean. The vast majority of the "nuclear waste" volume is stuff like protective gear, because even that is thrown away after using it once, because there's that much aversion to risk. They have to account for damn near every atom.
If you'd like to make an actual rebuttal, you're going to have to try harder. You aren't even making any specific claim, but just saying I'm incorrect broadly with no detail. You look silly.
Exactly, and nuclear energy is the opposite of that. It takes decades to build and those non-existing micro-reactors are the latest investor scam that make evel less economic and technical sense than regular sized reactors.
Now, tell me how this is wrong. I've given you the data. If you want to rebut, please give details so it can be discussed, otherwise you prove you don't have an argument.
If you base your argument on fan-fiction then there is little point in discussing this further 🤷
The safty regulations were put into place because they proved to be necessary due to serious (and costly to repair) construction defects found in all of those reactors that were put up in such a short time. And not a single operator of a nuclear power plant will ever pay for the storage costs of the nuclear waste, because as with fossile fuels that is almost entirely externalized to the society at large and future generations.
"Fan fiction." I'm the only one who provided sources. Fucking idiot...
They are literally paying for their waste. Look at the satellite view of a reactor. You can see the casks usually. No, there are not negative externalities involved. There's no radiation leakage and there's no danger posed. Almost no one has been harmed by a nuclear reactor, and even the disasters there was more damage done by evacuation than the actual radiation.
You're the one living in a make-believe world here. You've made zero verifiable claims so far. Presumably why is because, as soon as you do, you'll be fact checked and proven wrong. You're making yourself look silly while insulting me. Please, make a claim that can be checked or fuck off. You're making everyone dumber.
Context: I'm currently doing a PhD in nuclear engineering
Hard-line advocates of nuclear power usually point to its role as a 'baseload' generation, but this term is often misused. A lot of people use it as if it means "reliable power on demand" as opposed to wind and solar which is not (without batteries). But baseload generation generally refers to plants with unvarying output that provide the minimum energy consumption of the grid, so that other (varying output) energy sources can be turned up or down to make up the deficit.
The "unvarying" part is very important for nuclear power. Conventional nuclear plants (PWRs/LWRs) really hate when you vary their power output. This is because varying heat and radiation flux through the fuel rod cladding causes a "racheting" effect which accelerates the swelling of fuel pellets against them leading to formation of cracks in the surface oxide, which can propagate into the bulk metal if power goes up and down too often, leading to rupture of the fuel rod cladding (which is bad). Anything below 85% power output for longer than 2 weeks is classed as extended reduced power operation (ERPO) and should be minimised - typically it is done for maintenance purposes.
This is important because it influences how much of your energy production can actually come from nuclear. France for example generates something like 75% of its electrical power from nuclear, but this is only possible because they are surrounded by countries which import a lot of energy (i.e. Germany and the UK), so they can offload excess power there and avoid putting their plants into ERPO. If Germany and the UK had similarly high amounts of nuclear, the system would not work and a lot of plants would experience reliability issues.
All this is to say, nuclear is an excellent energy source for making up a large, unvarying chunk of energy production (say, ~30%) but anything much more than that can cause more problems than it solves. One power source which can provide reliable on-demand time-varying energy is... batteries! Which is one of the reasons that recent advances in battery + solar are so exciting to me. A power grid made up of solely nuclear and renewables working together to meet time-varying demand is now completely plausible. So we dont have to choose between nuclear or renewables per se, we just have to deploy each in a way that suits its own merits.
Might I just add that nuclear isn't exactly dealing with climate change and water shortages that well.
It's something I never really thought about, but plenty of nuclear plants have faced climate related issues in recent years, and been forced to shutdown or reduce output.
Also, in an age of drone warfare, decentralised power production is potentially also a huge plus.
This is true. We hear about it happening a lot in mainland europe because there are a lot of inland reactors relying on rivers/reservoirs, however coastal reactors aren't vulnerable in the same way. Climate change certainly isn't making nuclear obsolete, but it definitely changes the way we need to think about cooling systems
Of course, coastal reactors are vulnerable in other ways. Climate change can exacerbate extreme weather events. It's the annoying thing about lots of stuff, you only really find out what goes wrong, when it goes wrong.
Unknown unknowns, as some arsehole once put it.
Also, coal contains small amounts of uranium and thorium which gets concentrated in the fly ash. Fly ash which then gets spread across the area surrounding the power plants. So I'm certainly not saying nuclear is obsolete or particularly dangerous compared to alternatives like coal.
Absolutely! Though in practice battery storage tends to be more economical with renewables as the excess is higher (so electricity is cheaper) and storage time is shorter (as upping nuclear baseload would require you to account for differing long-term demand between seasons)
Pro, but as a temporary measure to eliminate fossil fuel usage, and it should be replaced with renewable energy later. But I doubt anything like that will ever happen.
Indeed, it would be a good temporary solution if we had started 30-40 years ago.. I'm afraid that where we'll past the point of a well thought of transition to renewable energy sources.
Also its a pretty outdated technical principle of boiling water with heat. Sun, wind and hydro has become way more efficient since then.
Highly centralized systems have always gone against my basically anarchist, emergent, bottom up approach I try to take to all things. At the same time, by the numbers, nuclear just makes more sense for the climate.
Solar or wind or hydro with battery, especially with the more modern batteries, fits both my general philosophy and the overall approach for the climate far better. It requires less technical skill (anyone here could install basic solar plus battery), its more modular, it allows for emergent systems; everything about it makes more sense.
If you believe we should make decisions collectively at the scale of a society, we shouldnt spend any money building nuclear at this point. And if you don't believe we should make decisions collectively at the scale of a society, you probably already didn't agree with the philosophy required to support nuclear.
The next generation of nuclear is supposed to be small, movable shipping container sized plants, could be great for small independent communities. Though they're yet to be commercially demonstrated.
I shared an office building with nuScale. I"m not interested.
We have solar and wind. We have batteries, they are getting better every year, and now with sodium replacing lithium, storage and the associated risks are effectively solved. Don't waste resources, our time, the environment, or peoples mental bandwidth on this.
We can and should transition towards fully decentralized non-centrally owned or managed systems.
Pro. One of the cleanest energy sources you can get. Highly reliable. Fear about waste is vastly overblown which becomes apparent when you spend even a second researching it.
It is one of the only viable energy sources for space travel, which means it's not something we should phase out or stop researching. The only real alternative at this time is hydrogen fuel cells, which are explosive, and a lot more complicated. Solar is only viable at a certain distance to the sun. Nuclear energy is the clear winner by almost every metric.
Think about how basic of a concept nuclear is. You have a spicy rock heat up fluid. The rock stays spicy for a long time and you rarely need to change it. That's it. You're not burning anything. You aren't using overly complicated electrical equipment and membranes. You don't need specific weather conditions or specific geological features like rivers or geothermal vents. It's a rock that gets hot and can stay hot.
Boiling water to spin turbines is so last century. We can generate electricity directly through the wind blowing and the sun shining now and it's way less expensive.
But listen! What if we can increase profits by removing these silly security measures and fire some engineers, also do not listen that smart nerd suggesting to look into the future and design it so that nor earthquake neither flood or enemy rockets can damage it.
I don't know? Maybe because that is a brain-dead fucking take on the importance of space travel and completely ignores how nearly every advancement in the space industry leads to massive improvements for people and society?
I don't have the time or patience to deal with people who are too fucking stupid to be able to comprehend why. Whitey on the moon... Are you fucking serious?
Same opinion here. It's basically a gas well boiler plant without the CO2. The reason we don't have more of it is due to politics surrounding transporting nuclear waste.
yes. its stable and powerful, you cant rely entitely on renewable energy because sun does not always shine, wind does not always blow and hydro-electric outputs too little power compared to the damage caused. you also cant rely on coal because youre going to fucking die
Anti, but only because it's far too late. Nuclear energy should have been the transitional technology that helped us move off fossil fuels and into renewables.
But due to a massive smear campaign in the 60's and 70's, and some unfortunate material circumstances, everybody began equating nuclear power with nuclear weapons.
Renewables are totally viable now, as China has most prominently shown in recent years. The damage that fossil fuels have done to our climate and environment are so extreme, and the political and economic entrenchment has grown so deep, that spending money and resources trying to get nuclear energy popular again is a waste.
Within the current capitalist system, it no longer makes sense to build them. They are too slow to come online, and they're more expensive than renewables. It would have been an ideal solution had the rich and powerful cared for even their own children. With that said, it still makes sense to maintain them, as they're actively keeping fossil fuels at bay to some degree.
If the world suddenly and magically became an anarchist utopia, I'd say it makes sense to build them going forward. We need to transition as much as possible as quickly as possible, and that means doing parallel efforts where the resources needed are different, which is to a degree the case with nuclear vs renewables. We are in a crisis and should act like it.
In a magical, pretend, ideal future where climate change is no longer an issue, I don't think it would make sense to have them. They require a lot of centralization, and renewables don't. We should opt for less centralization.
This is the key point. One supports or supposed policies. But "nuclear" is not one; it's a power source, not a policy. So then the serious discussions are what new power plants to build, and when to retire current nuclear plants... And those are both worthwhile topics with totally different considerations and answers.
It also depends where you live, because the alternatives are geographically dependent. Are you in South Dakota? Might wanna do solar or wind.
It also depends what scale you mean. A slightly wealthy homeowner in the US can afford their rooftop solar, but many people can't afford it or can't install it. And this matters, right? If the power companies are fucking us over, using less of their juice is a good idea, but only of we can... And this all ties into the relative benefits of nuclear.
I dunno the whole narrative framing of the game seems to be thematically lost on people obsessed with the game in my experience but a huge number play it so I know I have only experienced a small slice.
I mean, even ignoring narrative framing, nuclear power generation is kind of pain in the ass to manage in Factorio. Of course, it's also a massive step up compared to fossil fuels, so maybe some players just ignore the obvious downsides.
Pro. The waste storage required per kilowatt is tiny compared to the waste storage of coal. The all-told, long-term investment to power ratio is far better than fossil fuels in general. The death-print is safer than even solar.
Caveats
Strong and competent regulation is required. No plants should be built under Trumpism.
Our primary focus should be renewable sources of power and improved batteries to make them more reliable.
Anti-nuclear. Used to be pro-nuclear because the energy density would allow for very compact energy production, but I don't trust the government (or corporations) to have any meaningfully concentrated nuclear material. Maybe solid-state nuclear batteries can be made to work and we can use that to dilute the nuclear material -- not sure about that yet.
Pro. If you consider how absolutely minuscule the risks are (keep your regulatory bodies free of corruption, guys), all political criticism looks uninformed and performative, answers in this thread included.
Imagine an anti-vaxx hippie: presents as progressive, gushes of pointless contrarianism, easily exploitable by the estabilishment*. That's how I see the nuclear power-"critics", both here and elsewhere.
* E.g.: I consider the Green Party of Switzerland the epitome of counter-productive performative idiocy ever since they've been campaigning for replacing our NPPs with gas turbine plants. Fuckin' 🤡s the lot of them.
Anti. I really think we should figure out the waste first. I know there are arguments that it's better even with the waste, but you know that's how we get ourselves into bad situations down the road. Meanwhile there seem to be a lot of buildings around that could house wind and solar without even consuming more landscape.
Realistically though you should compare the waste it produces to the waste from coal plants, which produce about half a billion tons of fly ash per year. I'd argue this is order of magnitude more harmful than nuclear waste. New (read: worked out in the 1960s and then forgotten) nuclear tech also uses the waste to produce more energy. The waste also doesn't fly into the air like coal waste.
Most countries of the global south, when faced with the option coal vs nuclear, will err toward coal due to the far lower cost and weaker infrastructure. Nuclear is simply not that attractive an option if you're a poor country.
What else would it imply to state that Nuclear is actively competing against coal? If they're not ramping up, then it's not an argument because they're not currently choosing new coal over nuclear.
Yes, coal plants are much easier to build than nuclear.
Which is why nuclear is not really competing against coal in the global south...
I'm amazed at how level headed and straight forward the arguments are presented across a rather large variety of instances!
Also, against.
Renewable + Battery + grid is the way to go. Connect every power source and distribute the energy. Include redundancy because energy is important.
As someone who has done quite a bit of work on power systems (in the New Zealand context) recently.
You have to consider any energy generation technology in the environment it is going to be deployed in.
Whilst I am generally pro-nuclear; as a technology. It doesn't really work as a deployable energy system in comparison to other forms of generation; especially here in NZ. There are three main reasons for this:
Cost in both time and money to construct nuclear is far too high.
Industry to support nuclear doesn't exist in NZ. Expert techs, operators, fabricators etc are not here; we would need to build an industry alongside building the first plant.
Regulatory framework to enable nuclear generation is almost nonexistent. We have medical isotope framework; as a basic way to work with radiological material.
Bonus challenge; we would have to import all the fuel.
Countries with existing nuclear industries and power plant have a much easier time; but when comparing the cost in time and money to get the first GWh out of a nuclear generator; it is a hard sell.
One major advantage nuclear has over other forms of generation is physical footprint; effective power density is absolutely massive. To get similar power density in renewable generation, the only thing close would be the in development supercritical geothermal power; though nuclear would still have higher power density and is not geographically constrained.
Maybe things will change in the future. Maybe small modular reactors will eventuate in an easy to deploy way; or the developments in Chinese thorium reactors will pan out to a viable generation tech. But technology is not the only stumbling block that nuclear energy faces; especially in a small country that doesn't have an existing nuclear industry.
I know there is a lot of money being thrown at fusion; and that may change the game entirely, it is an interesting time to be looking at energy systems.
I wouldn't say I'm pro or against it. It's quite expensive and politically controversial so I doubt building more of it will help us decarbonize. But I don't support closing any plants that are currently running either, at least until we've fully decarbonized electricity production.
I'm unsure how this relates to anarchism though. Other than, if communities have control over what gets built near them I think it will be even more difficult to build more of them than it is now.
Anti, pro arguments only work in comparison to coal which is a low bar.
We frankly simply have not solved the waste issue. I study chemistry and yes, the amounts are tiny, but some isotopes in waste have half lives longer than any structure we can build would last and scaling up nuclear would scale up this problem before it's solved (just like we did with greenhouse gases).
Also it's objectively more expensive than any renewable source, as multiple independent studies have found.
Better than burning fossil fuels, which we should have stopped fifty years ago. That’s the debate, not whether we should be using renewables as much as possible.
Pro, I think a lot of the anti-nuclear sentiments are leftovers from when nuclear power was not as heavily regulated as it is now.
Now it's basically impossible for a meltdown except for if a literal natural disaster happens, and sometimes even then
And it's a very clean energy source, with the one problem of what to do with the radioactive waste, but there is far less waste than fossil fuels, and it's easier to get rid of.
I'm nominally pro, or maybe passively anti while cheaper, more scalable, and cleaner sources are at hand. If you're already going full wind, solar, and geo and there's still a rationale for a nuclear plant, I'm open to it. But that's a big fat if.
The thing with nuclear power is that it's FAR easier to convert a fossil fuel generator to nuclear than it is to convert it to green or to build a new one.
And yes, I agree, we need more green, but we first need to kill off all the fossil fuel options.
As a society, it's easier to do everything at once rather than one thing at a time. Edit: The difference with nuclear is that it's so much more expensive than other green options that spending on it now takes significant potential kwh out of the grid if it is given equal funding priority.
Although you are right in the sense that nuclear produces steam, I am not aware of any instance of this having been done. The steam turbine is such a small part of a nuclear plant.
In my view nuclear is best as a baseline production and heat production method. The baseline part may reduce as grid batteries smooth out the volatile production of the renewables.
The security problem ruins the amazing tech. In an age of terrorism and drones, the risk isn't acceptable. The same goes for hydro unfortunately, which is my fav energy form (I like watermills).
I'm pro nuclear because it's orders of magnitude better than the shit we're already doing and it turns out you can basically just put the spent fuel back where you found it yes I know that's a little reductionist but you get my point.
That said I also think renewables are a good idea and we need a mix but there's been so much damage done to nuclear image when it's a perfectly good power source
Deep geological disposal in underground mines or stable rock formations 200 to 1,000 meters deep is the globally accepted standard for isolating high-level nuclear waste.
I did say that I was oversimplifying it radically. We don't literally just put it back in the ground it needs to be in a smart place.
Makes sense, my country has been struggling with this problem for a while because it's tectonically simply not stable enough. And good luck convincing geologically suited countries to take everyone's waste.
Nation states will choose uranium / plutonium reactors so that they can abuse nuclear power for weapons grade material generation. But we already have nuclear proliferation. Cat's out of the bag. Given that nuclear is a huge win in almost every other way, I'm pro-nuclear even in the context of nation states.
I used to be anti-nuclear in the past but I realized a lot of the talking points were either wrong or directly favoring the fossil fuel companies. 100% for Nuclear and renewable energy.
Mostly anti since renewables are cheaper. I would be OK with nuclear used for filling the dips in renewable output. The SMRs proposed by all these startups seem like a very bad idea to me, but IDK. If fusion ever brings all that they promise, I could be pro.
You're way off on the amount of waste they produce.
If you collected the waste of every nuclear plant in the United States since 1950 in one place, it would only fill a football field up to about 30ft deep. That's really not all that much considering it's 70+ years of power. That's very easily manageable if people would just get over their fear.
The entire NPP is also nuclear waste when it is taken out of operation. That is a lot of waste. Sure, it may not be highly radioactive, but you cannot just dump it on a landfill and call it a day, either. Every screw, every doorknob, every everything has to be properly disposed of.
That's not how it works. Only a tiny fraction of the debris requires specialized handling and disposal. Doorknobs outside the containment building are absolutely not radioactive and are not treated that way. The radiation levels inside a nuclear plant are actually lower than the surrounding background radiation levels outside the plant.
Pro in general as a technology, it's likely necessary for long term space flight like probes, satellites, and devices that need to run for decades or longer with little to no maintenance. For powering facilities that need consistent, high energy especially in remote areas it should be an option. Homes and most facilities should use renewables as preferred means of generating power outside of fairly limited uses for nuclear.
All reactors are subject to overheat leading to meltdown when suddenly shutdown. They become massive energy vampires, requiring huge cooling power (and manpower) for up to 2 years after to avoid that.
What are the odds that a "social collapse" (war, plague, disaster, etc) leaves some with no workers and no external juice? Not if, when! Meltdowns will occur, some will breach containment. Only fools light an unextinguishable fire that kills them if they ever stop feeding it.
While reactor designs are "safe": this requires that they follow protocols, which often means unplanned downtime. Given the social pressures for energy, it seems that reactor operators will sometimes disobey shutdown requirements. Corruption is real in all societies. With reactors it absolutely includes a non-zero catastrophe chance. Again not if, when!
Reactors are safe, for a pre-designed lifespan. Often 50 years. To decommission properly is massively expensive and takes years of labour, and requires a replacement plant. Are operators actually squirreling away the funds to have this all saved up 50 years later (by "overcharging" now)? Or are the future governments just gonna keep patching a pig... not if, when!
What kind of containment system will work for 10s of thousands of years? What does that cost, or even look like?
All this only holds true for traditional large scale commercial reactors.
Newer large scale reactors designs don't require any power to cool once the reaction is shutdown (which is automatic if power is lost) and will not melt down if a loss of power happens.
Dedicated trust funds help pay for shutdown and yes, a new reactor would need to be built. This cost is significantly less than oil, gas, or coal over the long-term. Upfront cost with nuclear are higher, but only because of the large scale projects we currently utilize.
Sounds like a burden? Let me ask you how they control the pollution from Gas, Oil, or Coal. Trick question, they don't really control it at all except for some scrubbing. Please realize that 250,000 people die (low estimate) from pollution related to power generation every year.
So every year non-nuclear fossil based power generation is killing a quarter of a million people. I would like to hear how you logically deal with this in your argument against nuclear.
Some Countries don’t have Uranium and have to buy it from Countries like Russia
It's actually the urainium processing that is outsourced to Russia. The nuclear fuel processing is complicated and basically only makes sense to have if you need it for nuclear weapons production.
But another issue is that urainium mining is quite damaging to the environment, so countries like France like to outsource it to former colonies like Niger, which tells a lot of about power dynamics at play. Germany for example has sufficient uranium deposits that were mined in the past, but they abandoned that long before shutting down their reactors.
I think it works great in other places, but it is dangerous for America, where they will be built and maintained by bureaucratic Sociopathic corporations who will cut corners at every opportunity, until they fail, and kill millions.
Maybe someday America will evolve to the point where opportunities like this won't be automatically hijacked by financial psychopaths.
where they will be built and maintained by bureaucratic Sociopathic corporations who will cut corners at every opportunity, until they fail, and kill millions.
That applies everywhere though regardless of profit incentive. Even the Soviet Union cut corners on the development and running of the Chernobyl plant which led to its infamous disaster. It's not because of profiting mindset, but due to bureaucratic fear from an authoritarian leadership who want to speed up the process.
my issue with fission is that it is one of those ideas that are a perfect way to delay reasonable solutions (solar, wind and batteries) because some magical solution is arriving any second now.
Currently in reality? Under capitalism, genocide, planetary annihilation, etc? I'm opposed. It will absolutely be used as a tool of violence and exploitation like every other "technology" developed under capitalism.
In an imaginary world... It depends on the imaginary situation, etc. But that's largely irrelevant to actual reality.
As someone in Singapore where our land space constraints us from deploying large scale solar to fully meet our needs, nuclear (SMRs / Nano Reactors) is the next best solution without having to give up our energy independence to other countries.
I'm a fan of nuclear technology. Any plants working today should be maintained indefinitely, and in places that don't have any options due to geography building new ones today makes sense. And hopefully those investments can help make nuclear tech cheaper in the future with SMRs, etc.
That said, anywhere that is still burning fossil fuels on a nice sunny day should be investing all their energy money into building renewables. It's such an amazingly cheap and quick way to replace fossil fuels. Each panel hooked up is instantly displacing fossil fuels being burnt. And once you have enough solar to cover the daylight hours, you're going to be overproducing during the brightest hours and that will induce people to hook up batteries to profit from the "free" energy and now you've solved the duck curve hours.
I also have some reservations about humans being responsible enough. I live in Japan and do not trust that the energy companies have learned anything from Fukushima, they're just doing as little as possible to cover their asses. The end of Pax Americana and the rise of Climate Change unrest will also increase terrorism risks. It's not bad enough that I'm saying don't build nuclear, but I feel it's still enough of a risk that renewables should be preferred when possible (of course new tech mitigates this to some extent with safer spent fuels and smaller reactors). Just decentralizing the grid so that homes can generate their own power after storms is a huge win with renewables.
Nuclear is a great resource and we should try to keep all plants that are online today online.
However, expansion of nuclear in the corrupt, finance-capital USA should be deprioritized in favor of renewables and storage. The latter has insanely fast construction times and can be deployed much faster than new nuclear. We're racing against the clock to transition our society away from carbon polluting activities, and renewables present the greatest opportunity to cut down the largest emitting section: fossil fuel power.
Long term I think humanity needs to invest in more fission and definitely fusion, but we're in a climate crisis and need solutions now.
yeah, I'm overall thinking renewables + storage = a much better overall solution for generation, transmission, and impact.
I don't think we should 'get rid' of nuclear - the tremendous investment in giant steam run nuclear plants should be used, but we shouldn't build new ones, and should look really hard at how we're gonna store the waste in a secure manner.
Ideally waste-consuming reactors will come along to eat all those waiting storage pools of hot radionuclides and turn them into energy + inert waste, but until then we have to stop adding to the pile.
I love the nuanced and well thought answers this question generated!
I am mostly pro nuclear. It’s safe, great at scale (renewables aren’t), it’s a long term commitment (renewables and in particular solar aren’t), and requires relatively few rare materials (in particular compared to solar). It also avoids the battery problem.
This being said, it’s absurdly slow to come online and economically not as viable as renewables. So I wouldn’t support building new nuclear power plants over renewables. I would support going back in time and build them 20-30 years ago.
111 Comments
rockerface@lemmy.cafe · 49 pts · 5d
I'll take renewables over nuclear, but I'll take nuclear over fossil fuels.
poVoq@slrpnk.net · 34 pts · 5d
Aside from it being simply outdated and uneconomical, and given the community you are asking this in: there is an well studied argument that nuclear power is inherently authoritarian because of the necessary security requirements (and to a lesser extend centralisation of power production).
Cethin@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 3d
On the uneconomical aspect, this isn't really true. Yes, it's uneconomical to build an old reactor in the modern world. However, that's by design, not necessity. It isn't inherent to nuclear reactors that they are expensive.
They're expensive because of a bunch of hurdles we make them jump through that other sources of power get to skip. This is on purpose, to ensure they can't out-compete the existing energy companies that have all the money and power. As an example, no other power source has to account for all of its waste. Even renewables create waste they get to just ignore and let third-world countries deal with. The level of safety is also ridiculous, which raises costs. It's potentially safer than even many/most(/maybe all, if scaled properly) renewables.
As for outdated, I have no idea what this could even mean. Care to explain? There are new reactor designs. If you mean old designs are old then sure. If you mean the source of power itself does not function anymore, then that's absolutely insane.
Authoritarian? Sure, I guess. Our whole grid is the. As an Anarchist, sure, I'd prefer people to generate the power themselves. However, efficiencies of scale mean this isn't the best option short-term. We need to get off of dirty energy ASAP. Even solar benefits from scale. Kwh/$ is better on solar farms than an individual house. But also, micro-reactors are becoming a thing. They generate too much power for an individual house, but they do allow for localized power generation with nuclear.
poVoq@slrpnk.net · 1 pts · 3d
I wish nuclear power operators had to accout for all their waste, but that isn't true at all. And the rest of you comment is equal levels of ignoring reality.
Exactly, and nuclear energy is the opposite of that. It takes decades to build and those non-existing micro-reactors are the latest investor scam that make evel less economic and technical sense than regular sized reactors.
Cethin@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 3d
What do you mean? What waste isn't accounted for? Do you mean water vapor? That's the only thing you could mean. The vast majority of the "nuclear waste" volume is stuff like protective gear, because even that is thrown away after using it once, because there's that much aversion to risk. They have to account for damn near every atom.
If you'd like to make an actual rebuttal, you're going to have to try harder. You aren't even making any specific claim, but just saying I'm incorrect broadly with no detail. You look silly.
It does not take decades to build a nuclear reactor. It takes decades to deal with the bureaucratic red tape that is designed to keep us using fossil fuels. Reactors used to be built in less than 4 years. Most are built in 6-8 years, and very few take more than a single decade, let alone multiple. This is a silly myth spread by energy companies to prevent nuclear support, because it'd kill their business.
Now, tell me how this is wrong. I've given you the data. If you want to rebut, please give details so it can be discussed, otherwise you prove you don't have an argument.
poVoq@slrpnk.net · 0 pts · 3d
If you base your argument on fan-fiction then there is little point in discussing this further 🤷
The safty regulations were put into place because they proved to be necessary due to serious (and costly to repair) construction defects found in all of those reactors that were put up in such a short time. And not a single operator of a nuclear power plant will ever pay for the storage costs of the nuclear waste, because as with fossile fuels that is almost entirely externalized to the society at large and future generations.
Cethin@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 3d
"Fan fiction." I'm the only one who provided sources. Fucking idiot...
They are literally paying for their waste. Look at the satellite view of a reactor. You can see the casks usually. No, there are not negative externalities involved. There's no radiation leakage and there's no danger posed. Almost no one has been harmed by a nuclear reactor, and even the disasters there was more damage done by evacuation than the actual radiation.
You're the one living in a make-believe world here. You've made zero verifiable claims so far. Presumably why is because, as soon as you do, you'll be fact checked and proven wrong. You're making yourself look silly while insulting me. Please, make a claim that can be checked or fuck off. You're making everyone dumber.
Pennywise@quokk.au · 2 pts · 4d
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 4d
... while creating new problems...
fyzzlefry@retrolemmy.com · 2 pts · 3d
They're overstated problems, especially considering other forms of energy production.
davetortoise@reddthat.com · 34 pts · 4d
Context: I'm currently doing a PhD in nuclear engineering
Hard-line advocates of nuclear power usually point to its role as a 'baseload' generation, but this term is often misused. A lot of people use it as if it means "reliable power on demand" as opposed to wind and solar which is not (without batteries). But baseload generation generally refers to plants with unvarying output that provide the minimum energy consumption of the grid, so that other (varying output) energy sources can be turned up or down to make up the deficit.
The "unvarying" part is very important for nuclear power. Conventional nuclear plants (PWRs/LWRs) really hate when you vary their power output. This is because varying heat and radiation flux through the fuel rod cladding causes a "racheting" effect which accelerates the swelling of fuel pellets against them leading to formation of cracks in the surface oxide, which can propagate into the bulk metal if power goes up and down too often, leading to rupture of the fuel rod cladding (which is bad). Anything below 85% power output for longer than 2 weeks is classed as extended reduced power operation (ERPO) and should be minimised - typically it is done for maintenance purposes.
This is important because it influences how much of your energy production can actually come from nuclear. France for example generates something like 75% of its electrical power from nuclear, but this is only possible because they are surrounded by countries which import a lot of energy (i.e. Germany and the UK), so they can offload excess power there and avoid putting their plants into ERPO. If Germany and the UK had similarly high amounts of nuclear, the system would not work and a lot of plants would experience reliability issues.
All this is to say, nuclear is an excellent energy source for making up a large, unvarying chunk of energy production (say, ~30%) but anything much more than that can cause more problems than it solves. One power source which can provide reliable on-demand time-varying energy is... batteries! Which is one of the reasons that recent advances in battery + solar are so exciting to me. A power grid made up of solely nuclear and renewables working together to meet time-varying demand is now completely plausible. So we dont have to choose between nuclear or renewables per se, we just have to deploy each in a way that suits its own merits.
Souvenir@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 14 pts · 4d
Might I just add that nuclear isn't exactly dealing with climate change and water shortages that well.
It's something I never really thought about, but plenty of nuclear plants have faced climate related issues in recent years, and been forced to shutdown or reduce output.
Also, in an age of drone warfare, decentralised power production is potentially also a huge plus.
davetortoise@reddthat.com · 7 pts · 4d
This is true. We hear about it happening a lot in mainland europe because there are a lot of inland reactors relying on rivers/reservoirs, however coastal reactors aren't vulnerable in the same way. Climate change certainly isn't making nuclear obsolete, but it definitely changes the way we need to think about cooling systems
Souvenir@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 4d
Of course, coastal reactors are vulnerable in other ways. Climate change can exacerbate extreme weather events. It's the annoying thing about lots of stuff, you only really find out what goes wrong, when it goes wrong.
Unknown unknowns, as some arsehole once put it.
Also, coal contains small amounts of uranium and thorium which gets concentrated in the fly ash. Fly ash which then gets spread across the area surrounding the power plants. So I'm certainly not saying nuclear is obsolete or particularly dangerous compared to alternatives like coal.
alsimoneau@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 3d
What about nuclear + storage (pumped hydro, batteries) then? That should let you up the baseload a bit right.
davetortoise@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 3d
Absolutely! Though in practice battery storage tends to be more economical with renewables as the excess is higher (so electricity is cheaper) and storage time is shorter (as upping nuclear baseload would require you to account for differing long-term demand between seasons)
kibblebits@quokk.au · 21 pts · 5d
Pro, but as a temporary measure to eliminate fossil fuel usage, and it should be replaced with renewable energy later. But I doubt anything like that will ever happen.
MidnightMarauder@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 10 pts · 5d
Indeed, it would be a good temporary solution if we had started 30-40 years ago.. I'm afraid that where we'll past the point of a well thought of transition to renewable energy sources.
Also its a pretty outdated technical principle of boiling water with heat. Sun, wind and hydro has become way more efficient since then.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 5d
Against. 20 years ago I would have been for.
Highly centralized systems have always gone against my basically anarchist, emergent, bottom up approach I try to take to all things. At the same time, by the numbers, nuclear just makes more sense for the climate.
Solar or wind or hydro with battery, especially with the more modern batteries, fits both my general philosophy and the overall approach for the climate far better. It requires less technical skill (anyone here could install basic solar plus battery), its more modular, it allows for emergent systems; everything about it makes more sense.
If you believe we should make decisions collectively at the scale of a society, we shouldnt spend any money building nuclear at this point. And if you don't believe we should make decisions collectively at the scale of a society, you probably already didn't agree with the philosophy required to support nuclear.
SmoothOperator@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 5d
The next generation of nuclear is supposed to be small, movable shipping container sized plants, could be great for small independent communities. Though they're yet to be commercially demonstrated.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 5d
I shared an office building with nuScale. I"m not interested.
We have solar and wind. We have batteries, they are getting better every year, and now with sodium replacing lithium, storage and the associated risks are effectively solved. Don't waste resources, our time, the environment, or peoples mental bandwidth on this.
We can and should transition towards fully decentralized non-centrally owned or managed systems.
Pennywise@quokk.au · 2 pts · 4d
SmoothOperator@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 4d
Cool! Still a demonstrator plant, it looks like, but good to see it's in commercial operation.
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 5d
Pro. One of the cleanest energy sources you can get. Highly reliable. Fear about waste is vastly overblown which becomes apparent when you spend even a second researching it.
It is one of the only viable energy sources for space travel, which means it's not something we should phase out or stop researching. The only real alternative at this time is hydrogen fuel cells, which are explosive, and a lot more complicated. Solar is only viable at a certain distance to the sun. Nuclear energy is the clear winner by almost every metric.
Think about how basic of a concept nuclear is. You have a spicy rock heat up fluid. The rock stays spicy for a long time and you rarely need to change it. That's it. You're not burning anything. You aren't using overly complicated electrical equipment and membranes. You don't need specific weather conditions or specific geological features like rivers or geothermal vents. It's a rock that gets hot and can stay hot.
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.wtf · 0 pts · 5d
Boiling water to spin turbines is so last century. We can generate electricity directly through the wind blowing and the sun shining now and it's way less expensive.
SmoothOperator@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 5d
To be fair, wind turbines are also just spinning turbines.
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.wtf · 6 pts · 5d
True but you get to skip the heating up some water bit.
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 5d
Wind turbines don't work in space.
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.wtf · 1 pts · 5d
Do you live in space? I don't.
arrow74@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 4d
All of their pro points were about space travel explicitly
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com · -1 pts · 4d
Cool story but that doesn't mean shit to me living on earth.
liuther9@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 4d
But listen! What if we can increase profits by removing these silly security measures and fire some engineers, also do not listen that smart nerd suggesting to look into the future and design it so that nor earthquake neither flood or enemy rockets can damage it.
TheBloodFarts@lemmy.ca · -1 pts · 5d
BUT RADIATION BAD
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com · -2 pts · 4d
Who gives a shit? People have actual real problems on Earth. These kind of wasteful distractions are fundamental reason why.
Whitey On The Moon
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 4d
I don't know? Maybe because that is a brain-dead fucking take on the importance of space travel and completely ignores how nearly every advancement in the space industry leads to massive improvements for people and society?
I don't have the time or patience to deal with people who are too fucking stupid to be able to comprehend why. Whitey on the moon... Are you fucking serious?
jaykrown@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 4d
I am pro nuclear energy. It's the most efficient way to generate sustainable electricity in abundance in the smallest amount of space.
rafoix@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 3d
We're not running out of space. That's a strange thing to use as a decider.
LodeMike@lemmy.today · 4 pts · 4d
Same opinion here. It's basically a gas well boiler plant without the CO2. The reason we don't have more of it is due to politics surrounding transporting nuclear waste.
Tiger_Man_@szmer.info · 9 pts · 4d
yes. its stable and powerful, you cant rely entitely on renewable energy because sun does not always shine, wind does not always blow and hydro-electric outputs too little power compared to the damage caused. you also cant rely on coal because youre going to fucking die
Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml · 9 pts · 4d
Anti, but only because it's far too late. Nuclear energy should have been the transitional technology that helped us move off fossil fuels and into renewables.
But due to a massive smear campaign in the 60's and 70's, and some unfortunate material circumstances, everybody began equating nuclear power with nuclear weapons.
Renewables are totally viable now, as China has most prominently shown in recent years. The damage that fossil fuels have done to our climate and environment are so extreme, and the political and economic entrenchment has grown so deep, that spending money and resources trying to get nuclear energy popular again is a waste.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 4d
Nuclear energy is still popular. China is building many reactors and many countries are ordering SMRs.
Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net · 8 pts · 5d
Within the current capitalist system, it no longer makes sense to build them. They are too slow to come online, and they're more expensive than renewables. It would have been an ideal solution had the rich and powerful cared for even their own children. With that said, it still makes sense to maintain them, as they're actively keeping fossil fuels at bay to some degree.
If the world suddenly and magically became an anarchist utopia, I'd say it makes sense to build them going forward. We need to transition as much as possible as quickly as possible, and that means doing parallel efforts where the resources needed are different, which is to a degree the case with nuclear vs renewables. We are in a crisis and should act like it.
In a magical, pretend, ideal future where climate change is no longer an issue, I don't think it would make sense to have them. They require a lot of centralization, and renewables don't. We should opt for less centralization.
SolarPunker@slrpnk.net · 8 pts · 4d
It's less efficient compared to more decentralized renewable energy; it's ok to keep the working centrals but I'm against new ones.
fodor@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 4d
This is the key point. One supports or supposed policies. But "nuclear" is not one; it's a power source, not a policy. So then the serious discussions are what new power plants to build, and when to retire current nuclear plants... And those are both worthwhile topics with totally different considerations and answers.
It also depends where you live, because the alternatives are geographically dependent. Are you in South Dakota? Might wanna do solar or wind.
It also depends what scale you mean. A slightly wealthy homeowner in the US can afford their rooftop solar, but many people can't afford it or can't install it. And this matters, right? If the power companies are fucking us over, using less of their juice is a good idea, but only of we can... And this all ties into the relative benefits of nuclear.
supersquirrel@lemmy.ca · 8 pts · 5d
I am against the idea "factorio" type people seem to see in nuclear in that it could solve our problems with endless energy, no politics needed.
It is an ideology that is dangerous if nuclear power can't fulfill that promise and its even more dangerous if it can.
I am not entirely against the technology itself however.
rockerface@lemmy.cafe · 7 pts · 5d
People who think nuclear can solve all our problems with endless energy clearly never actually played Factorio.
supersquirrel@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 5d
I dunno the whole narrative framing of the game seems to be thematically lost on people obsessed with the game in my experience but a huge number play it so I know I have only experienced a small slice.
rockerface@lemmy.cafe · 2 pts · 5d
I mean, even ignoring narrative framing, nuclear power generation is kind of pain in the ass to manage in Factorio. Of course, it's also a massive step up compared to fossil fuels, so maybe some players just ignore the obvious downsides.
SnerkRabbledauber@lemmy.today · 8 pts · 5d
Pro. The waste storage required per kilowatt is tiny compared to the waste storage of coal. The all-told, long-term investment to power ratio is far better than fossil fuels in general. The death-print is safer than even solar.
Caveats
BillyGruff82@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 7 pts · 5d
Anti-nuclear. Used to be pro-nuclear because the energy density would allow for very compact energy production, but I don't trust the government (or corporations) to have any meaningfully concentrated nuclear material. Maybe solid-state nuclear batteries can be made to work and we can use that to dilute the nuclear material -- not sure about that yet.
These days I favor local solar and wind.
ace_garp@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 5d
PRO: For use on Pioneer 10 and 11; Voyager 1 and 2; Galileo; Ulysses; Cassini; New Horizons; as RTG power sources.
ANTI: Terrestrial use that needs 10,000 years of safe storage considerations for spent fuel and waste.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 4d
Whitey on the Moon... Now thanks to nuclear energy! \s
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.wtf · 7 pts · 5d
I'm in favor of the cheapest and quickest to build means of power generation. That's renewables and storage.
Nuclear is a massive waste of money.
aldhissla@piefed.world · 6 pts · 3d
Pro. If you consider how absolutely minuscule the risks are (keep your regulatory bodies free of corruption, guys), all political criticism looks uninformed and performative, answers in this thread included.
Imagine an anti-vaxx hippie: presents as progressive, gushes of pointless contrarianism, easily exploitable by the estabilishment*. That's how I see the nuclear power-"critics", both here and elsewhere.
* E.g.: I consider the Green Party of Switzerland the epitome of counter-productive performative idiocy ever since they've been campaigning for replacing our NPPs with gas turbine plants. Fuckin' 🤡s the lot of them.
Professorozone@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 4d
Anti. I really think we should figure out the waste first. I know there are arguments that it's better even with the waste, but you know that's how we get ourselves into bad situations down the road. Meanwhile there seem to be a lot of buildings around that could house wind and solar without even consuming more landscape.
ZMoney@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 4d
Realistically though you should compare the waste it produces to the waste from coal plants, which produce about half a billion tons of fly ash per year. I'd argue this is order of magnitude more harmful than nuclear waste. New (read: worked out in the 1960s and then forgotten) nuclear tech also uses the waste to produce more energy. The waste also doesn't fly into the air like coal waste.
DrunkenDuckling@lemmus.org · 1 pts · 4d
Why? Nuclear is not competing against coal, it's competing against renewables
ZMoney@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 4d
It is in developing economies. India and China are still building coal plants in addition to renewables.
DrunkenDuckling@lemmus.org · 1 pts · 4d
Not quite. China is planning less coal capacity but existing contracts are still being built. They're not ramping up construction afaik. https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/china-hits-brakes-coal-power-permits-constructions-remain-robust
Most countries of the global south, when faced with the option coal vs nuclear, will err toward coal due to the far lower cost and weaker infrastructure. Nuclear is simply not that attractive an option if you're a poor country.
ZMoney@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 4d
And who said they were ramping up? I don't get what you're arguing here or why. Yes, coal plants are much easier to build than nuclear.
DrunkenDuckling@lemmus.org · 0 pts · 4d
What else would it imply to state that Nuclear is actively competing against coal? If they're not ramping up, then it's not an argument because they're not currently choosing new coal over nuclear.
Which is why nuclear is not really competing against coal in the global south...
stiephelando@discuss.tchncs.de · 5 pts · 3d
I'm against nuclear because it's too expensive and there is no proper place to store the depleted material.
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 3d
There's plenty of places?
And do remember, it's taking what was already a dangerous material, processing it to be less dangerous, and then putting it somewhere safe
monkeyslikebananas2@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 3d
Unlike where we store all the CO2, plenty of room for that in our atmosphere.
Foofighter@discuss.tchncs.de · 5 pts · 4d
I'm amazed at how level headed and straight forward the arguments are presented across a rather large variety of instances!
Also, against. Renewable + Battery + grid is the way to go. Connect every power source and distribute the energy. Include redundancy because energy is important.
absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz · 5 pts · 4d
As someone who has done quite a bit of work on power systems (in the New Zealand context) recently.
You have to consider any energy generation technology in the environment it is going to be deployed in.
Whilst I am generally pro-nuclear; as a technology. It doesn't really work as a deployable energy system in comparison to other forms of generation; especially here in NZ. There are three main reasons for this:
Countries with existing nuclear industries and power plant have a much easier time; but when comparing the cost in time and money to get the first GWh out of a nuclear generator; it is a hard sell.
One major advantage nuclear has over other forms of generation is physical footprint; effective power density is absolutely massive. To get similar power density in renewable generation, the only thing close would be the in development supercritical geothermal power; though nuclear would still have higher power density and is not geographically constrained.
Maybe things will change in the future. Maybe small modular reactors will eventuate in an easy to deploy way; or the developments in Chinese thorium reactors will pan out to a viable generation tech. But technology is not the only stumbling block that nuclear energy faces; especially in a small country that doesn't have an existing nuclear industry.
I know there is a lot of money being thrown at fusion; and that may change the game entirely, it is an interesting time to be looking at energy systems.
Archimedes@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 3d
NZ is earthquake and volcano prone, not ideal for nuclear.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net · 5 pts · 5d
I wouldn't say I'm pro or against it. It's quite expensive and politically controversial so I doubt building more of it will help us decarbonize. But I don't support closing any plants that are currently running either, at least until we've fully decarbonized electricity production.
I'm unsure how this relates to anarchism though. Other than, if communities have control over what gets built near them I think it will be even more difficult to build more of them than it is now.
DrunkenDuckling@lemmus.org · 5 pts · 4d
Anti, pro arguments only work in comparison to coal which is a low bar. We frankly simply have not solved the waste issue. I study chemistry and yes, the amounts are tiny, but some isotopes in waste have half lives longer than any structure we can build would last and scaling up nuclear would scale up this problem before it's solved (just like we did with greenhouse gases). Also it's objectively more expensive than any renewable source, as multiple independent studies have found.
NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone · 4 pts · 4d
Better than burning fossil fuels, which we should have stopped fifty years ago. That’s the debate, not whether we should be using renewables as much as possible.
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 pts · 3d
Pro, I think a lot of the anti-nuclear sentiments are leftovers from when nuclear power was not as heavily regulated as it is now.
Now it's basically impossible for a meltdown except for if a literal natural disaster happens, and sometimes even then
And it's a very clean energy source, with the one problem of what to do with the radioactive waste, but there is far less waste than fossil fuels, and it's easier to get rid of.
yakko@feddit.uk · 2 pts · 3d
I'm nominally pro, or maybe passively anti while cheaper, more scalable, and cleaner sources are at hand. If you're already going full wind, solar, and geo and there's still a rationale for a nuclear plant, I'm open to it. But that's a big fat if.
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 3d
The thing with nuclear power is that it's FAR easier to convert a fossil fuel generator to nuclear than it is to convert it to green or to build a new one.
And yes, I agree, we need more green, but we first need to kill off all the fossil fuel options.
yakko@feddit.uk · 1 pts · 3d
As a society, it's easier to do everything at once rather than one thing at a time. Edit: The difference with nuclear is that it's so much more expensive than other green options that spending on it now takes significant potential kwh out of the grid if it is given equal funding priority.
wizzor@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 3d
Although you are right in the sense that nuclear produces steam, I am not aware of any instance of this having been done. The steam turbine is such a small part of a nuclear plant.
In my view nuclear is best as a baseline production and heat production method. The baseline part may reduce as grid batteries smooth out the volatile production of the renewables.
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 3d
Coal-to-Nuclear is actually pretty common, LINK
Archimedes@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 4d
The security problem ruins the amazing tech. In an age of terrorism and drones, the risk isn't acceptable. The same goes for hydro unfortunately, which is my fav energy form (I like watermills).
rafoix@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 3d
Im pro nuclear power as long as it is cost effective.
Renewable solar and wind with backup batteries is by far the least expensive power supply at the moment.
Anything contradicting the previous sentence is a complete lie that was spread by liars with money to gain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Malyca@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 5d
Pro. Clean and safe energy. I say that as someone that was told one of my chronic conditions is because I was downwind of Chernobyl as a child.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 4d
Cool story but it doesn't sound very safe to me.
bacon_pdp@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 5d
We are orbiting a giant fucking fusion reactor. Why would I be for turning off the sun?
Aeri@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 4d
I'm pro nuclear because it's orders of magnitude better than the shit we're already doing and it turns out you can basically just put the spent fuel back where you found it yes I know that's a little reductionist but you get my point.
That said I also think renewables are a good idea and we need a mix but there's been so much damage done to nuclear image when it's a perfectly good power source
DrunkenDuckling@lemmus.org · 4 pts · 4d
Can you explain what you mean by this? I study Chemistry and am from a Uranium producing country and this frankly just seems wrong.
Aeri@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 4d
Deep geological disposal in underground mines or stable rock formations 200 to 1,000 meters deep is the globally accepted standard for isolating high-level nuclear waste.
I did say that I was oversimplifying it radically. We don't literally just put it back in the ground it needs to be in a smart place.
DrunkenDuckling@lemmus.org · 2 pts · 4d
Makes sense, my country has been struggling with this problem for a while because it's tectonically simply not stable enough. And good luck convincing geologically suited countries to take everyone's waste.
infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net · 3 pts · 4d
Nation states will choose uranium / plutonium reactors so that they can abuse nuclear power for weapons grade material generation. But we already have nuclear proliferation. Cat's out of the bag. Given that nuclear is a huge win in almost every other way, I'm pro-nuclear even in the context of nation states.
MysticMushroom1776@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 3d
I used to be anti-nuclear in the past but I realized a lot of the talking points were either wrong or directly favoring the fossil fuel companies. 100% for Nuclear and renewable energy.
bountygiver@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 3d
Pro, but renewables do deploy way faster so we do want those renewables to be running while we wait for the nuclear plants to be constructed.
Turning off fossil fuel burning plants is the priority
sobchak@programming.dev · 2 pts · 5d
Mostly anti since renewables are cheaper. I would be OK with nuclear used for filling the dips in renewable output. The SMRs proposed by all these startups seem like a very bad idea to me, but IDK. If fusion ever brings all that they promise, I could be pro.
ooo_shiny@lemmy.nz · 2 pts · 3d
At this rate, I’m grateful for anything that isn’t burning fossil fuels.
I’d rather see solar and wind power though.
starlinguk@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 4d
Expensive, takes forever to build, produces shit ton of waste. Also ugly as sin.
Fossil fuel companies want you to support it because it takes a really long time to set up and they can turn a profit during that time.
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 4d
You're way off on the amount of waste they produce.
If you collected the waste of every nuclear plant in the United States since 1950 in one place, it would only fill a football field up to about 30ft deep. That's really not all that much considering it's 70+ years of power. That's very easily manageable if people would just get over their fear.
UpperBroccoli@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 3d
The entire NPP is also nuclear waste when it is taken out of operation. That is a lot of waste. Sure, it may not be highly radioactive, but you cannot just dump it on a landfill and call it a day, either. Every screw, every doorknob, every everything has to be properly disposed of.
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 3d
That's not how it works. Only a tiny fraction of the debris requires specialized handling and disposal. Doorknobs outside the containment building are absolutely not radioactive and are not treated that way. The radiation levels inside a nuclear plant are actually lower than the surrounding background radiation levels outside the plant.
weps@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 4d
I'm pro but think it needs to be replaced over time
not shut down and replaced by non renewables like it's now sometimes the case
whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 5d
Pro in general as a technology, it's likely necessary for long term space flight like probes, satellites, and devices that need to run for decades or longer with little to no maintenance. For powering facilities that need consistent, high energy especially in remote areas it should be an option. Homes and most facilities should use renewables as preferred means of generating power outside of fairly limited uses for nuclear.
LeonineAlpha@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 3d
All reactors are subject to overheat leading to meltdown when suddenly shutdown. They become massive energy vampires, requiring huge cooling power (and manpower) for up to 2 years after to avoid that.
What are the odds that a "social collapse" (war, plague, disaster, etc) leaves some with no workers and no external juice? Not if, when! Meltdowns will occur, some will breach containment. Only fools light an unextinguishable fire that kills them if they ever stop feeding it.
While reactor designs are "safe": this requires that they follow protocols, which often means unplanned downtime. Given the social pressures for energy, it seems that reactor operators will sometimes disobey shutdown requirements. Corruption is real in all societies. With reactors it absolutely includes a non-zero catastrophe chance. Again not if, when!
Reactors are safe, for a pre-designed lifespan. Often 50 years. To decommission properly is massively expensive and takes years of labour, and requires a replacement plant. Are operators actually squirreling away the funds to have this all saved up 50 years later (by "overcharging" now)? Or are the future governments just gonna keep patching a pig... not if, when!
What kind of containment system will work for 10s of thousands of years? What does that cost, or even look like?
https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/
Doomsider@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 3d
All this only holds true for traditional large scale commercial reactors.
Newer large scale reactors designs don't require any power to cool once the reaction is shutdown (which is automatic if power is lost) and will not melt down if a loss of power happens.
Dedicated trust funds help pay for shutdown and yes, a new reactor would need to be built. This cost is significantly less than oil, gas, or coal over the long-term. Upfront cost with nuclear are higher, but only because of the large scale projects we currently utilize.
As far as containing nuclear waste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
Sounds like a burden? Let me ask you how they control the pollution from Gas, Oil, or Coal. Trick question, they don't really control it at all except for some scrubbing. Please realize that 250,000 people die (low estimate) from pollution related to power generation every year.
So every year non-nuclear fossil based power generation is killing a quarter of a million people. I would like to hear how you logically deal with this in your argument against nuclear.
SomeRandomNoob@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 pts · 4d
Anti:
poVoq@slrpnk.net · 4 pts · 4d
It's actually the urainium processing that is outsourced to Russia. The nuclear fuel processing is complicated and basically only makes sense to have if you need it for nuclear weapons production.
But another issue is that urainium mining is quite damaging to the environment, so countries like France like to outsource it to former colonies like Niger, which tells a lot of about power dynamics at play. Germany for example has sufficient uranium deposits that were mined in the past, but they abandoned that long before shutting down their reactors.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 3d
I think it works great in other places, but it is dangerous for America, where they will be built and maintained by bureaucratic Sociopathic corporations who will cut corners at every opportunity, until they fail, and kill millions.
Maybe someday America will evolve to the point where opportunities like this won't be automatically hijacked by financial psychopaths.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 3d
That applies everywhere though regardless of profit incentive. Even the Soviet Union cut corners on the development and running of the Chernobyl plant which led to its infamous disaster. It's not because of profiting mindset, but due to bureaucratic fear from an authoritarian leadership who want to speed up the process.
Pennywise@quokk.au · 2 pts · 4d
sanzky@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 4d
and will continue to be the future, forever
Pennywise@quokk.au · 3 pts · 4d
sanzky@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 2d
my issue with fission is that it is one of those ideas that are a perfect way to delay reasonable solutions (solar, wind and batteries) because some magical solution is arriving any second now.
we do not need fission. we need political will
Pennywise@quokk.au · 1 pts · 2d
geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 3d
Pro unless you want to build one in a 15 mile proximity of my house then I get cold feet
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 4d
Currently in reality? Under capitalism, genocide, planetary annihilation, etc? I'm opposed. It will absolutely be used as a tool of violence and exploitation like every other "technology" developed under capitalism.
In an imaginary world... It depends on the imaginary situation, etc. But that's largely irrelevant to actual reality.
Ardyssian@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 4d
As someone in Singapore where our land space constraints us from deploying large scale solar to fully meet our needs, nuclear (SMRs / Nano Reactors) is the next best solution without having to give up our energy independence to other countries.
drkt@scribe.disroot.org · 1 pts · 5d
I love it! I don't trust my government to build it. We have solar now and we can't even do that.
kalleboo@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 3d
I'm a fan of nuclear technology. Any plants working today should be maintained indefinitely, and in places that don't have any options due to geography building new ones today makes sense. And hopefully those investments can help make nuclear tech cheaper in the future with SMRs, etc.
That said, anywhere that is still burning fossil fuels on a nice sunny day should be investing all their energy money into building renewables. It's such an amazingly cheap and quick way to replace fossil fuels. Each panel hooked up is instantly displacing fossil fuels being burnt. And once you have enough solar to cover the daylight hours, you're going to be overproducing during the brightest hours and that will induce people to hook up batteries to profit from the "free" energy and now you've solved the duck curve hours.
I also have some reservations about humans being responsible enough. I live in Japan and do not trust that the energy companies have learned anything from Fukushima, they're just doing as little as possible to cover their asses. The end of Pax Americana and the rise of Climate Change unrest will also increase terrorism risks. It's not bad enough that I'm saying don't build nuclear, but I feel it's still enough of a risk that renewables should be preferred when possible (of course new tech mitigates this to some extent with safer spent fuels and smaller reactors). Just decentralizing the grid so that homes can generate their own power after storms is a huge win with renewables.
Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 3d
I'm nuclear neutral.
Nuclear is a great resource and we should try to keep all plants that are online today online.
However, expansion of nuclear in the corrupt, finance-capital USA should be deprioritized in favor of renewables and storage. The latter has insanely fast construction times and can be deployed much faster than new nuclear. We're racing against the clock to transition our society away from carbon polluting activities, and renewables present the greatest opportunity to cut down the largest emitting section: fossil fuel power.
Long term I think humanity needs to invest in more fission and definitely fusion, but we're in a climate crisis and need solutions now.
digital_alchemist@discuss.tchncs.de · 0 pts · 3d
I was pro for a long time until I read Nassim Taleb on the tail risk associated with nuclear power.
Look at Fukushima.
Look at nuclear power plants becoming targets in war.
Look at how the capitalists who will be running these things treat risk generally.
There are better options available.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 3d
yeah, I'm overall thinking renewables + storage = a much better overall solution for generation, transmission, and impact.
I don't think we should 'get rid' of nuclear - the tremendous investment in giant steam run nuclear plants should be used, but we shouldn't build new ones, and should look really hard at how we're gonna store the waste in a secure manner.
Ideally waste-consuming reactors will come along to eat all those waiting storage pools of hot radionuclides and turn them into energy + inert waste, but until then we have to stop adding to the pile.
Eq0@literature.cafe · 0 pts · 5d
I love the nuanced and well thought answers this question generated!
I am mostly pro nuclear. It’s safe, great at scale (renewables aren’t), it’s a long term commitment (renewables and in particular solar aren’t), and requires relatively few rare materials (in particular compared to solar). It also avoids the battery problem.
This being said, it’s absurdly slow to come online and economically not as viable as renewables. So I wouldn’t support building new nuclear power plants over renewables. I would support going back in time and build them 20-30 years ago.
weps@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 4d