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.
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.
Hi, I work in waste handling, and I would like to tell you about dangerous materials and what we do with them.
There are whole hosts of chemicals that are extremely dangerous, but let's stick with just cyanide, which comes from coal coking, steel making, gold mining and a dozen chemical synthesis processes.
Just like nuclear waste, there is no solution for this. We can't make it go away, and unlike nuclear waste, it doesn't get less dangerous with time. So, why isn't anyone constantly bringing up cyanide waste when talking about gold or steel or Radiopharmaceuticals? Well, that's because we already have a solution, just not "forever".
Cyanide waste, and massive amounts of other hazardous materials, are simply stored in monitored facilities. Imagine a landfill wrapped in plastic and drainage, or a building or cellar with similar measures and someone just watches it. Forever. You can even do stuff like build a golfcourse on it, or malls, or whatever.
There are tens of thousands of these facilities worldwide, and nobody gives a solitary fuck about them. It's a system that works fine, but the second someone suggests we do the same with nuclear waste, which is actually less dangerous than a great many types of chemical waste, people freak out about it not lasting forever.
That's uhh, not what that says. One of the two mentions of half life are your body converting cyanide into thiocyanate, which will kill you and depending on your last bowel movement, make your corpse into hazardous waste itself.
The other mention is hydrogen cyanide in air, which is lighter than air and will decompose back into cyanide eventually, scattering it over a large area. Which will technically make it go away from your site, but spreading toxic waste over the countryside is illegal for a reason.
Oh yeah, you could totally just leave it in a giant pool and ignore it. It'll react, evaporate and eventually break down into cyanide again, rain down, subtly poison the area, react again, evaporate again, etc.
And that's great for the owner of the big pool of cyanide, and very bad for everyone else. Stuff that evaporates doesn't disappear, the cyanide doesn't magically change into cookiedough. You're just spreading it around more.
Hydrogen cyanide will turn into "cookie dough" in 1-5 years. Which is way shorter than "forever".
The way you said it in your first comment made it seem longer lasting than radioactive waste. Which it isn't according to the linked PDF. That is the only point I was trying to make.
... Hydrogen cyanide is literally what has been used to execute people in gas chambers and genocide during the Holocaust. The LC(Lo), the lowest recorded lethal concentration is 107ppm, resulting in death in 10 minutes. That's, objectively, far more dangerous than the respective material that firefighters were exposed to at Chernobyl. You don't want that in any appreciable quantity in the air around people that you want to continue living.
I mean, spent fuel is actually quite lethal when not packaged, but you get something like 300-400MWh out of a kilo of fuel. And that's significantly more than I'll use in my lifetime.
I'd gladly keep a kilo of dry-casked spent fuel in my house. It'd make an excellent coffee table or something, if a bit hard to move. I would absolutely not put a lifetime supply of benzene anywhere near my house.
Edit: it would make a shitty coffee table. 1 kilo of uranium oxide is just under 100ml
Cyanide is used extensively in precious metal recycling too. So even reclaiming resources has a harsh chemical cost. Meeting workers from there I was surprised to say the least about how 'casually' they work with Cyanide. Clearly they have safty protocall but nothing like what I imagined something like Cyanide would call for.
In addition to hazardous materials regulations, I also do workplace safety, and this doesn't surprise me at aaaaall. People get really casual around stuff that kills you slowly.
In Spain we are starting to get negative prices every weekend for electricity thanks to renewables. France is not even close to those prices with their bet for nuclear.
Don't get me wrong, I love nuclear power. And I'm not a big fan ok what thousands of windmills made to our landscapes. But efficiency wise renewable is unbeatable nowadays.
Look. Bitcoins might be useless at a societal level. But if we're going to use excess renewable energy to drive out of business the crypto-miners who get their power from coal...
They don't need to be exclusive. Power generation should be diverse. Otherwise prices will go through the roof on times without wind (happens in Germany). This can lead to higher energy prices in combination with high energy exports.
Nuclear power does not solve the issue here. Nuclear reactors take hours or even days to ramp up or down. They are not quick enough to react to such occasions.
True, it wouldn't be enough, This is why Germany still has a lot of coal-fired power station and natural gas power stations, despite huge investments into renewables, and is also investing a lot into wood-fired power stations (imo a really terrible idea). The nuclear plants could still ease the situation by giving a stable basic load that has some planable variability (wind models are getting also better every year and aren't that bad as it is). For now renewables cannot really provide a very stable basic load (at least not here, might be different for other areas).
There are great concepts to improve all of this with stuff like pumped-storage hydroelectricity, but those cannot be build everywhere and take up a lot of space. It is going forward and I think nuclear power will come to an end eventually. For now, I think they still have their place (and imo Germany acted irrationally by shutting them all down).
I mean, we've been lucky that France completly fucked their energy sector up (hints towards that nuclear plants probably also won't be the ultimate solution), otherwise we'd have lost a loooot of money and would have had energy prices even worse.
Negative energy prices are a bad thing! That means that someone is dumping energy into the grid (you should be paying the grid if you have solar panels!!) In the UK all renewable energy had to be called 'experimental' so that the pricing was fixed and the government picks up the tab - that's not good. Check this map - right now the wind isn't blowing and solar hasn't got out of bed - so most of the countries using renewables are looking shit - later today solar will kick in, but tonight it will be bad again. That isn't a solution.
Energy is expensive in France because we are legally forced by european regulation to sell at those prices. Our energy is the least expensive to produce
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.
There are downsides to nuclear these days. Incredibly high cost with a massive delay before they're functioning. Solar + wind + pumped hydro + district heating is where it's at in 2024.
Also, tie together more countries' power grids to even out production and demand of renewables, and reduce the need for other backup sources.
For a fraction of the cost of nuclear, increase the storage capacity as well. We've had days where the price per MWh was negative in many hours, because of excess production.
The barriers to carbon free energy aren't technical, they're purely political.
it has got cheaper, but it has to get cheap enough that you can buy enough batteries with the difference.
I'm not sure it has become that cheap. Maybe these sodium battery things will get developed.
No, there is pumped storage. Honestly, despite the plethora of start-ups claiming to have a solution (sodium batteries, molten-salt, etc) The only really proven way to store electricity for later is pumped storage, but that relies on geography (hills) which not everyone has. Batteries are great for phones, and cars but they simply don't scale to countries.
That is actually very impressive. Thanks! I remain a bit skeptical as its only 1/5th of what they need and it's only one region of one (rich) country. Still, 10GW of lithium battery would be one hell of a fire ;-)
Or convert excess to hydrogen and provide resilience, or have arrangements for industry to consume the excess. Or ramp down your generation at those times. Or shift excess to neighbouring grids.
This is wrong. Right now, europe is experiencing high pressure and doesn't have any wind. Check this out its map that shows you how much wind is being produced right now! Can you provide a source that says " the wind is always blowing somewhere" or is it just a platitude?
You probably also didnt heard about Thorium based molten salt reactors, they are much safer than conventional nuclear, also cheaper, and you can have a 50MW installation in space not much larger than a shipping container. A 50MW solar installation is close to 1km2 and thats without any storage included. It even can be modified to run on spent fuel of conventional nuclear power plants.
Please understand that negative prices are the market for electricity breaking down! That is not a good thing. It should mean that if you have solar panels on your roof you have to pay to participate in the national grid because you are dumping energy into the grid when it can't use it, but special rules have been made for renewable plants. Literally, imagine a contract-to-supply for wind or solar...
I understand very well the implications of the negative price, which is why I advocated NOT to spend trillions in nuclear, when issues of balancing demand and production can be solved for a fraction of what nuclear costs.
Still not a reason to not build them, the entire point is for nuclear to handle the load when solar/wind can't provide due to weather. Other renewables will still be producing the bulk of the power we need, but at night nuclear will be handling any demand spikes, each of them would greatly reduce the number of batteries required to satisfy the demand. They can stay until our solar output is so high we can just start electrolyzing water into hydrogen as energy storage.
Though pumped hydro is sometimes opposed by environmental groups because it does absolutely decimate local environments.
I have high hopes for sodium batteries. The ones that have been released on the market are simply perfect (if scaled up) for local grid storage in countries with a lot of space and will hopefully get better energy density in line with Lithium Iron Phosphate with time.
Salt batteries have been the cold fusion of battery tech for like 10 years, but now it is finally coming to fruition. I hope to install a solar installation with salt batteries in 5 years or so, myself.
If you're suggesting using Nuclear as a peaker plant or to turn it off and on whenever wind/solar is not up for it then I'm sorry to say that it's not viable. Nuclear generators don't handle well being turned off and on.
You can make Thorium reactors much smaller and cheaper, basically a 50MW unit is not much larger than a shipping container, while being much more safe than standard nuclear plants.
The largest issue is over-regulation of the nuclear power in general.
there is simply no way to call a 50MW solar plant cleaner than nuclear and its probably not even that much cheaper in the end. Compare that to a shipping container sized reactor... Only thing in the way, is the nuclear scare and government regulations.
The cost is less from the design and more from the safety regulations. Best case scenario the state just starts making nuclear power plants, it's just not a good idea to mix profit incentive with nuclear.
I'm pro nuke energy but to pretend there are no downsides is what got us into the climate mess we are in in the first place.
Cost, being a major drawback, space being another. And of course while they almost never fail, they do occasionally, and will again. And those failures are utterly catastrophic, and it'd hard to convince a community to welcome a nuclear plant, and if the community doesn't want it then it can't or shouldn't be forced onto them.
They also represent tactical strike sites in time of combat engagement. Big red X for a missile.
There are also significant environmental concerns, as we really have no good way to dispose of nuclear waste in a safe or efficient manner at this time.
It's likely that nuclear based energy is the future, but you need to discuss the bad with the good here or we are just going to end up at square one again. There are long term ramifications.
Worth noting that all modern failures have been GE models or ancient Westinghouse models. Modern nuclear reactors built by Westinghouse are virtually immune from meltdown, and Westinghouse is the lead player in new builds. Nuclear safety has come miles since the like of Fukushima, and especially 3 Mile Island. I'd feel perfectly safe living near a new Westinghouse nuclear plant.
There are no unsinkable ships. No matter how safe the Titanic is, keep enough of them on the sea and one will eventually sink the way least people expected. If life on Earth depends on a Titanic never sinking...we're fucked eventually.
Life on Earth depends on no more than a couple on nuclear plants blowing up catastrophically.
I agree with everything you say. It really is spot on. What I don't understand is how, with your awareness, do you still consider yourself pro-nuclear. Honest question, I really am curious.
This is a shocker for many on social media but you can accept that something you want is not perfect but still want it, or see good in a bad person, but still not want them on the throne.
Just because I can be realistic about it's pros and cons instead of blindly parroting that I have been told to parrot doesn't mean I can't be pro nuclear.
Other power sources have more problems. And I say just launch the waste into space and eventually the reactors will just be out of the stratosphere and it won't matter if it explodes.
But you got to walk before you can run.
I just dislike when people pretend there are no downside to nuke, EV, wind, etc, because if they make one little comment on a con suddenly they're some anti enviro Trump sucker and get dogpiled
There's a difference in something being not perfect and being fundamentally flawed. My confusion is because you perfectly verbalized why I think it's flawed.
I could understand being in favor of using nuclear temporarily until renewables are more reliable. I don't agree but I understand the thought process. It's a calculated risk, an acceptable gamble. But being aware of all the issues with nuclear and still be in favor of it long term, in my opinion, doesn't make sense.
Mind you, I'm not trying to attack you, I'm genuinely intrigued and curious.
I dunno what that guy was thinking, but it seems obvious to me that nuclear fusion is the long term solution for energy generation.
Nuclear fission not so much, but it's definitely debatable which has more fundamental flaws between fission and wind/hydro/solar. All renewable energy sources ultimately depend on natural processes which are not reliable or permanent.
Nuclear fission has no such limitations, but instead trades long term risk for short term stability. Basically renewable sources are and always will be somewhat unreliable, and Nuclear fission is the least bad reliable energy source to pair with the renewables. So in the medium term, fission makes a lot more sense than fossil fuels, and in the long term we should be looking to fusion.
This immediately discards like, everything you've said up until now, though. It matters if it explodes on the way up challenger style and irradiates half of the continent with a massive dirty bomb of nuclear waste. It's way more cost effective, efficient, and safer to just put it somewhere behind a big concrete block and then pay some guy to watch it 24/7, and make sure the big concrete block doesn't crack open or suffer from water infiltration or whatever.
I mean to be fair you do make it pretty easy to discredit your entire argument, when you're just gonna say that anyone calling you out on this very obviously stupid idea is a bot. Like that's the same thing again.
Maybe I'm a victim of Poe's law, but I've seen "launch nuclear waste into space" get way more repute than it deserves as an idea from people who have no clue about the actual issues with, even just normal aspects to do with energy generation. It's a shorthand signal that lets me know that someone's had all their thinking on it done for them by shitty pop science and shitty science journalism. It's like if someone believes in antivax, or something. I'm probably not going to really think they're a credible source, after that. This is also bad if the shit they're saying is itself lacking in external sources which I can rely on outside of them.
I'm also flexing my brain right now because none of the shit you said at all really backs up the idea the nuclear energy is the future. Like, if you think it's inevitable that more plants collapse and it's inevitable that nuclear power plants get destroyed by missiles in times of war (also a great idea, on par with disposing of it in space, let me irradiate the exact area I'm trying to capture for miles and miles around), then you wouldn't want nuclear power. If you believe in that and then you also believe in the overblown problem of nuclear waste, then there's not really a point, there's no point at which the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
The reason people aren't going to accept nuclear if they believe it has cons is because like half of those cons are, albeit overblown, catastrophic for life on the planet, and the other half are failures to conceptualize based on economic boogeymen, just the same as with solar power. Political will problems, rather than problems with physical reality or core technologies. But still, problems that conflict with the existence of the idea itself.
You're not going to convince people to go in on nuclear power, your stated idea, if you only point out it's flaws, and then also post ridiculous shit.
we tried to, then the state we were gonna stick it all in said "eh maybe we don't want to the country's home for spent fuel, considering how it will stay hot for tens of thousands of years.
so our solution was to just... ignore it. store it in cooling pools at every plant spread all over the country. because hundreds of different waste holding ponds are SURE to be better than the thing we were planning lol.
They made the hard choice of where to put the waste and stuck with it long enough to build the facility. They call it “Onkalo”. It’s a creepy marvel of engineering.
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 :/
While I agree that getting rid of coal first would have been the better strategy, I don't get this nuclear power fetish and constant bashing of Germany on this while most countries are doing worse than Germany. Nuclear power is extremely expensive, we have as of now no storage solution for nuclear waste in Germany and Germany has no source of nuclear material itself. There are quite a few drawbacks
Nothing generates more than nuclear (like it's not even comparable), it has basically zero emissions and there are countries like Finland who'll happily let you burry it there, tho you ofc don't need to go that far away. You don't need to dispose it nearly as often as coal ash, so it being in another country ain't really that big of a deal.
Ofc solar is also a great option, because of the versatility, sadly German seems to really fucking love wind.
I didn't say nuclear was ever big in Germany. The whole point is about Germany being against it. If you mean the part where I said it was half their energy production, I meant coal+lignite.
In Australia the coal and gas industries appear to be pushing nuclear quite hard, mainly because they distract from the renewable options preferred by the market. They know that while we’re arguing over literally every other power source, they can just keep burning holes in the ground.
im fact they're closing one of the last scaled down power plant simulator, where scientists and students could have a hands down experience in learning about It
im not german, but its so sad, the thing was even made of glass so you could literally see the process
Oh thank god... Apparently they aren't destroying it YET. There is hope. Personally, I'd feel a lot safer if it went into more nuclear loving hands, like the French or Czech, actually, most of Germany's neighbors would do.
Yes but the grid doesn't carry power efficiently over extremely long distances. You're putting undue load on the grid if you expect wind blowing 500 miles away to cover all the power needs of the area it's supposed to supply as well as every neighboring area where there's not enough power.
This isn't just an efficiency issue you can solve by throwing more windmills at the issue. If there's too much power flowing through the lines we have currently, things break. Usually with fires and exploding transformers. Our power grid is designed for distributed production, but with on-demand generation as a backup for when intermittent generation is underperforming. Batteries are one option to achieve this, but they're expensive to build in the scale we need them. Hydrogen fuel production is an interesting candidate to fill this niche and for all-renewable power, but the efficiency is quite low so you're basically tripling the cost per unit energy produced.
But one way or another, you need additional infrastructure to power the grid with zero fossil fuels. Nuclear, batteries, hydrogen fuel, or a total revamp of transmission infrastructure all require expensive construction projects. Nuclear is the only one that's been done at scale, that's why I want to see it given a fair chance again. But I also think plenty of other options are promising BECAUSE they are novel, and I'd love to see a future where a combination is used to make a carbon-free, brownout-free power grid
