But we don't really have it now, which is the main problem. In the time it takes to build these things (also for the money it takes), we could plaster everything full with renewables and come up with a decentralized storage solution. Plus, being dependent on Kazachstan for fissile material seems very... stupid?
We're reaching the point where discussing cost in regard to the energy crisis makes us look like fucking idiots.
Imagine what kids reading the history books are going to think of these discussions.
And 10 years isn't that long really. If someone said we could use no fossil fuels in energy generation in 10 years time that doesn't sound long at all.
Cost is a proxy for productivity and resources. So while it is stupid to say that the energy transition is too expensive, shouldn't we rather invest our productivity and resources into a faster and cheaper solution? Drawing focus away from renewables is dangerous as others have mentioned, because it is too late to reach our goals with nuclear.
Really gives me the warm fuzzies when someone looks at changes to physical systems over time then draws a trend line into the future indefinitely without any citations or discussion of plausibility for the part they drew on.
Which part specifically do you take issue with? It's a bounded timeframe with over 60 references. We're already 4 years into their predicted trends and on track so it seems like they are into something.
All the charts on page 15. The ones where they extrapolate exponential improvement for a decade while only citing themselves. Their prediction is 15% annually for storage cost improvements in Li-ion batteries which they call 'conservative'
Our analysis conservatively assumes that battery energy storage capacity costs will continue to decline over the course of the 2020s at an average annual rate of 15% (Figure 3).
Let us check if their souce updated. $139 for 2023? That isn't a 15% decrease since 2019's $156, let alone year over year since then, which would be under $90. In spite of last year's drop that is still more than the 2021 price of $132. I don't know what 'on track' means to you but it must be something different than it means to me.
Thank you, appreciate you showing specifically what your issue is. I agree the timeline for the battery costs hasn't worked out exactly because of some anomalies over the last year or two but the trend is sharply down again. So it seems like we are on track to achieve a cost of around $90 by 2025 now rather than 2024 at least according to Goldman Sachs.
If your issue is with the exact timeline, I say that's fair enough, but being off by a year with battery costs isn't too bad I don't think. Of course as with all forecasting we'll have to see exactly how it pans out in reality but it's a pretty big risk if you want to start building a nuclear reactor now, factoring in construction time plus payback period.
If you start building a new nuclear plant today, it’ll start generating power around the year 2045, by which time renewables with storage will have gotten even cheaper.
Bet you the public will be on the hook to pay for that white elephant because utility companies privatize profits and socialize losses.
Except we have better options than we did 10 years ago.
I'd be all for nuclear if we rolled back the clock to 2010 or so. As it stands, solar/wind/storage/hvdc lines can do the job. The situation moved and my opinion moved.
If you want the answer, here's the data. Solar is slightly safer than Nuclear, Nuclear is slightly safer than Wind. The three are WAY safer than fossil fuels.
When a car crashes, there's usually a magnitude less people impacted then when a plane crashes. But you know what? Air travel is still much, much safer than car travel. Large but infrequent incidents can be much less dangerous than smaller but more common incidents in the aggregate.
They're just looking at death rates, not the reduced economic activity due to restrictions in usable land, and the transition costs for moving.
They also looked at, say, the mortality rate for the thyroid cancer and count the 2-8% death rate only
The other 92% suffered nothing I guess. . . /s
But i'll grant them that coal seems way way worse.
Though basing on 2007 study is a time before the IED kicked in and a lot of LCPD plants were running limited hours instead of scrubbers - modern coal has to be cleaner by the directive - unfortunately the article is paywalled so hard to tell what their sample was based on time-wise and tech-wise.
Hydro estimate is interesting because it shows the impact of the one off major catastrophic event.
Yeah it looks bombed-out as fuck to anything more complicated than plant-life. I'm not saying we shouldn't be pursuing nuclear energy, just that this argument feels very poorly constructed and intentionally misleading.
It having an inconclusive effect on wildlife, but wildlife clearly being able to survive in the region, doesn't really detract from what I originally thought.
From the article you linked:
"No matter what the consequences of lingering radiation might be, there were massive benefits to people leaving."
Yeah I think we both agree that nuclear is worth pursuing, it's not 100% safe but nothing is; even windmills catch fire or spin apart. It's far safer than fossil fuels.
Yep, I'm also afraid of taking airplanes because a handful of them have crashed. But per TWh produced, nuclear is statistically the safest method... just like that it's statistically safer to fly across the country than to drive there, but I'm too scared for that :/
You mean the modern reactors who are still not in a commercial productive state? But even if these would be NOW ready to actually be available it's still so that there are a vast overwhelming majority of the old reactors which are not as safe as the meme was insinuating.
All of those were caused by human mistake. But this does not mean that they must be discarded. Because human mistake happens. If it is with a solar panel, it's inconsequential. Not with a nuclear reactor. So yes, it is an issue to consider, but in truth all it means is that we have to be VERY careful
If it is so that a human mistake can cause a big number of casualties and massive environmental damage it is far from safe, even if you are very careful.
This is just so fucking dumb. Yeah coal sucks. We should get rid of coal as quickly as possible. But saying nuclear is safer than coal while ignoring all other forms of energy that are orders of magnitude safer is as disingenuous as it gets.
200 years vs. 70 years. IDK if this is comparable. Also it is so that with nuclear accidents theres a lot of additional environmental damage, not just the human casualties.
Not defending coal mining here, coal is no good energy source by all means.
Coal is often radioactive when it comes out of the ground, and thanks to poor regulations, is often radioactive when it goes into the powerplant, leading to radioactive particles coming out of the smokestacks and landing anywhere downwind of the plants.
More people have died from radiation poisoning from coal than from all of the nuclear accidents combined. But, as you said, 200 years vs. 70 years. But, also, nuclear is much more heavily regulated than coal in this regard due to the severity of those accidents. The risk of a dangerous nuclear power plant is nowhere near as large as commonly believed. It doesn't take long to find longlasting environmental disasters due to fossil fuels, from oil spills to powerplant disasters. They're used so heavily that it's just so much more likely to occur and occur more often.
All this to say that fossil fuels suck all around and we should be looking at all forms of replacement for them, nuclear being just one option we should be pursuing alongside all the others.
Nuclear is by far the safest form of energy production. Even with the big accidents, the impact hasn't been that big.
Chernobyl was by far the biggest, but that was 40 years ago, in a poorly designed plant, with bad procedures and a chain of human errors. We've learned so much from that accident and that type of accident couldn't even have happened in the plants we had at the time in the west. Actually if the engineers that saw the issue could contact the control room right away, there would not have been any issue. In 1984 that was a problem, in 2024 not so much, we have more communication tools than ever.
The impact of Chernobyl was also terrible, but not as bad as feared back in the time. In contrast to the TV series, not a lot of people died in the accident. With 30 deaths directly and another 30 over time. Total impact on health is hard to say and we've obviously have had to do a lot to prevent a bigger impact, but the number is in the thousands for total people with health effects. Even the firefighters sent in to fix stuff didn't die, with most of them living full lives with no health effects. And what people might not know, the Chernobyl plant has had a lot of people working there and producing power for decades after the disaster. It's far from the nuclear wasteland people imagine.
Fukushima was pretty bad, but the impact on human life and health has been pretty much nonexistent. The circumstances leading up to the disaster were also very unique. A huge earthquake followed by a big tsunami, combined with a design flaw in the backup power system, combined with human error. I still to this day don't understand how this lead to facilities being closed in Germany, where big earthquakes don't happen and there is hardly any coast let alone tsunamis. It's a knee jerk reaction that makes no sense. Studies have indicated the forced relocation of the people living near there has been a bigger impact on people's health than anything the power plant did.
Compare this to things we consider to be totally normal. Like driving a car, which kills more people in a week than ever had any negative impacts from nuclear power.
Or say solar is a far more safe form of power, even though yearly hundreds of people die because of accidents related to solar installations. Or for example hydroplants, where accidents can also cause a huge death toll and more accidents happen.
And this is even with the non valid comparison to the current forms of energy where we know it's a big issue. But because the alternative isn't perfect, we don't change over.
Iam so sick of this conversation. It is not cheap, it’s not clear where to let the waste and in the end it’s even dangerous. Don’t let some populists make you think nuklear energy is good.
France made a big mistake to go all in. All projects take longer than expected and cost much more than calculated.
Not only does Germany import electricity from France (which comes from...?), but Germany has (according to this) a substantially higher carbon footprint per capita.
If the only issue is cost and projects taking longer than expected, isn't that a good tradeoff for carbon neutral power?
And yes, of course, I would prefer renewables, you would prefer renewables, we all would. But it's somewhat disingenuous to decry the use of nuclear, advocate for renewables, and at the same time, rely heavily on coal, as Germany does (or at the very least, did recently.
Germany Imports 0,5% of the Electricity from France. It’s not that we are depending on it. The day ahead prices for electricity are lower in Germany than they are in France. The Coal Plant are not running on full capacity, cause it is cheaper to import electricity through the European electricity Grid. Level of burning coal is the same level that it was in the 60’s. The most imported electricity is Norway water power and Danish wind Power.
The cheap news that we depend on France are just wrong. No idea why everybody is riding this dead horse.
Even in the summer 2022 when gas prices where high caused by the Ukraine war and the summer was hot, we had to help our France with energy, cause their nuclear power plants couldn’t get enough cooling water from the rivers, cause the water lvl in it was to low and the most power plant needed maintenance.
And the CO2 thing. The emissions are infinite high, cause there is not a solutions for it. Not even close! I just don’t buy the shit, that the EU declared nuclear as co2 free. That’s bullshit.
I like to discuss and get new ideas. But the whole nuclear thing is just stupid and so many people are ignoring the facts about that.
China will be offering nuclear waste disposal services once they complete the molten salt reactors that we designed in the '60s. Nuclear waste will be a non-issue, unlike the cyanide waste created in coal and natural gas plants.
Nuclear waste is still an unsolved problem that absolutely no one wants to touch with a ten foot pole. Also nuclear power is a pretty expensive method of power generation and can't be insured, leaving all risk of disaster on the shoulders of society. To be clear: society will be pretty fucked when a nuclear disaster happens anyway.
No it is not. If you calculate in the future money tax payers have to pay to keep the nuclear waste safe (for thousands of years) or the cost of a larger incident like Chernobyl or Fukushima which also has to be paid by the tax payers then the 'cheap nuklear power' is not so cheap as it looks like...
The disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima are symptoms of a greater issue: construction and maintenance of an extremely volatile and sensitive process reliant upon the integrity of infrastructure and quality of manpower.
Nuclear requires a stable society and economy flush with resources and education and little to no risk of political stability.
Those places are welcome to invest heavily into nuclear while CO2 concentrations build up as emmissions continue unabated.
I agree on them being safe - when rules are properly adhered to, they're extremely safe, similarly to air travel. People only suspect their safety because when they do fail, they tend to fail spectacularly, again similar to air travel.
Having said that, they may be efficient to operate, but they are by no means efficient to build. They cost a lot of resources, and have a 10 year lead time - plus you need to worry about the cost of waste storage and decommissioning.
So sure, nuclear is better than fossil fuels, but you're just kicking the nonrenewable can down the road.
That time and resources would be far better spent on renewables, because that where humanity is gonna have to go long-term no matter how well any other alternatives work.
Isn't the whole thing with renewables that we can't ramp production with demand and don't have storage figured out? Use renewables as much as you can, and use nuclear to fill in those gaps.
The storage will probably have a similar lead time anyways and isn't as proven as nuclear.
Nuclear is the worst possible option to fill said gaps. Nuclear reactor need to run at a mostly stable output permanently, they are slow to react to changes and can't be switched on or off at will.
You could use them to generate a stable base power level, but that's the opposite of what we need. It wouldn't change anything regarding the need of energy storage.
The best option currently as a gap filler is gas cause it can be turned on or off in minutes when needed.
Not keeping up with demand is a self-made problem. Multiple EU countries already have multiple days a year where they use 100% renewables.
Totally. Tinpot dictators getting nukes is nothing to worry about. And the waste can just be handwaved away. After all, they have a storage facility in Finland that will probably come online in a couple of years. Problem solved.
The waste is a fair point - storage isn't a long term solution but then I suppose it can be managed in the interim, not like the effects of climate change.
More nuclear plants means more capacity and diversification in supply chains, i.e. it's easier to acquire technology and supplies through dark channels. That will lead to more proliferation. Where do you think North Korea got its nukes? The answer is Pakistan, by the way.
It's unsafe, not renewable, not independent from natural resources (which might not be present in your country, so you need to buy from dictators) and last but not least crazy expensive.
I didn't realize Australia and Canada who has highest uranium reserves are dictators. Canada also used to be highest uranium producer until relatively recently.
There is no need. Though Kazakhstan and Russia may be cheapest if you're near there.
