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
edit: the tech is cool as hell. go nuts on research reactors. nuclear medicine has saved my sisters life twice.... but i'm sorry, its just not a sane solution to the climate crisis.
Nuclear lobby really tries to sell us to the fact, that it's better to have control over power by a few big players. Must be terrifying to think about people creating their own power eventually.
Who says it needs to be controlled by a few big players?
I mean, obviously we never would, but there could absolutely be a right way to do this. Nationalization could be a solution. Or something like co-determination.
I'm sure nuclear can be super safe and efficient. The science is legit.
The problem is, at some point something critical to the operation of that plant is going to break. Could be 10 years, could be 10 days. It's inevitable.
When that happens, the owner of that plant has to make a decision to either:
Shut down to make the necessary repairs and lose billions of dollars a minute.
Pretend like it's not that big of a deal. Stall. Get a second opinion. Fire/harass anyone who brings it up. Consider selling to make it someone else's problem. And finally, surprise pikachu face when something bad happens.
In our current society, I don't have to guess which option the owner is going to choose.
Additionally, we live in a golden age of deregulation and weaponized incompetence. If a disaster did happen, the response isn't going to be like Chernobyl where they evacuate us and quarantine the site for hundreds of years until its safe to return. It'll be like the response to the pandemic we all just lived through. Or the response to the water crisis in Flint Michigan. Or the train derailment in East Palestine.
Considering the fallout of previous disasters, I think it's fair to say that until we solve both of those problems, we should stay far away from nuclear power. We're just not ready for it.
Hi i was a nuclear mechanic, and that's not how it works. I'm on the toilet so I'm not gonna explain it now. Arm chair expert, uninformed opinions like this are part of the reason we're stuck on fossil fuels to begin with.
Everyone brings up Chernobyl like almost 4 entire decades of scientific advancement just didn't happen.
I was a nuclear plant owner and that's not how it doesn't work. I too have a toilet related reason why I won't contribute meaningfully to this discussion.
The reason we're stuck on fossil fuels isn't just because of the people's opinions. The main reason is the same as for most other major problems: money.
The problem is not science, the problem is not tech, the problem is people, making decisions, like making Fukushima's sea barriers 3 or 4 meters shorter than worse case scenario because money. Nuclear can be safe. People and money make it unsafe.
I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.
You would be surprised to know the amount of scientific research with actual solutions that aren't applied cause goes against the fossil fuel companies and whatnot. Due to the fact that they have market monopoly.
Nuclear is the best and most sustainable energy production long term. You get left with nuclear waste which we are still figuring out how to deal with, but contemporary reactors are getting safer and more efficient. Not to mention breeder reactors can use the byproducts of their energy production to further produce energy.
What are you talking about? In 2023, solar power alone generated 1.63 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity. Twice as much as was generated by coal, and more than half as much as was generated by nuclear. Solar plus wind out performed nuclear by hundreds of gigawatts.
The only thing holding back renewable power is grid level energy storage, and that's evolving rapidly.
The problem with renewables is the fluctuation. So you need something you can quickly spin up or down to compensate. Now you can do that with nuclear reactors to some extent - but they barely break even at current energy prices, and they keep having the same high cost while idle.
So a combination of grid storage and power plants with low cost when idle (like water) is the way to go now.
I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.
Modern nuclear energy produces significantly less waste and involves more fuel recycling than the historical predecessors. But these reactors are more expensive to build and run, which means smaller profit margins and longer profit tails.
Solar and Wind are popular in large part because you can build them up and profit off them quickly in a high-priced electricity market (making Texas's insanely expensive ERCOT system a popular location for new green development, paradoxically). But nuclear power provides a cheap and clean base load that we're only able to get from coal and natural gas, atm. If you really want to get off fossil fuels entirely, nuclear is the next logical step.
Every commercial fuel recycling plant in existence releases large amounts of radioactivity into the air and water, so I dont really see them as a good alternative.
Considering how long it would take to build safe reactors, how expensive it would be and how much radioactive contamination would be created both at the production of fuel and later when the storage ever goes wrong after thousands of years, I just dont see any reason to ever invest into it nowadays, when renewables and batteries have gotten so good.
I just dont see any reason to ever invest into it nowadays, when renewables and batteries have gotten so good.
Renewables and batteries have their own problems.
Producing and processing cobalt and lithium under current conditions will mean engaging in large-scale deforestation in some of the last unmolested corners of the planet, producing enormous amounts of toxic waste as part of the refinement process, and then getting these big bricks of lithium (not to mention cadmium, mercury, and lead) that we need to dispose of at the battery's end of lifecycle.
Renewables - particularly hydropower, one of the most dense and efficient forms of renewable energy - can deform natural waterways and collapse local ecologies. Solar plants have an enormous geographic footprint. These big wind turbines still need to be produced, maintained, and disposed of with different kinds of plastics, alloys, and battery components.
Which isn't even to say these are bad ideas. But everything we do requires an eye towards the long-term lifecycle of the generators and efficient recycling/disposal at their end.
Nuclear power isn't any different. If we don't operate plants with the intention of producing fissile materials, they run a lot cleaner. We can even power grids off of thorium. Molten salt reactors do an excellent job of maximizing the return on release of energy, while minimizing the risk of a meltdown. Our fifth generation nuclear engines can use this technology and the only thing holding us back is ramping it up.
Unlike modern batteries, nuclear power doesn't require anywhere near the same amount of cobalt, lithium, nickel and manganese. Uranium is surprisingly cheap and abundant, with seawater yielding a pound of enrichable uranium at the cost of $100-$200 (which then yields electricity under $.10/kwh).
We can definitely do renewables in a destructive and unsustainable way, recklessly mining and deforesting the plant to churn out single-use batteries. And we can do nuclear power in a responsible and efficient way, recycling fuel and containing the relatively low volume of highly toxic waste.
But all of that is a consequence of economic policy. Its much less a consequence of choosing which fuel source to use.
Economicaly might be viable, but there is so much unused experimental tech that has higher potential and scales better (higher scientific development as well).
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.
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.
Yes yes. Let's continute to use energy sources which are limited in terms of available but necessary resources and cause highly problematic by-products. It has been going on so well so far. Hasn't it?
Nothing about nuclear energy production is good, sensible and safe! You are dependent on a finite resource, you have to put in an incredible amount of effort to keep it running. Not to mention the damage caused by a malfunction (see Fukushima and Chernobyl).
What are you even talking about?!?! There is so much uranium in the world. Even if we completely switched over to nuclear power and without improvements in Nuclear tech, our sun would have fizzled out and we still would have uranium left.
Uranium is more abundant than silver and we don't need much to power a nuclear reactor.
I like how people take Fukushima and Chernobyl as examples for disasters. Please go look up how many people have died from those disasters. Please go check. I'll wait.
Chernobyl: 2
Fukushima: 0
Keep in mind that Chernobyl was built in the 50s with 50s tech it never maintained during the USSR era.
Fukushima did not anticipate a tsunami. Because of the Fukushima disaster we know have new protocols to improve future nuclear builds. If anything Fukushima is a prime example how safe a nuclear reactor can be even when the worst scenario happens.
I like how people take Fukushima and Chernobyl as examples for disasters. Please go look up how many people have died from those disasters. Please go check. I'll wait.
Chernobyl: 2
Fukushima: 0
Are you really that dillusional that you think that the only casualties are the people who died in the incident? Hundreds of peoples suffered from cancer and other long term effects alone in chernobyl. The area is still hazardous to people (as some 'clever' Russian invaders just proofed two years ago)
What are you even talking about?!?! There is so much uranium in the world. Even if we completely switched over to nuclear power and without improvements in Nuclear tech, our sun would have fizzled out and we still would have uranium left.
Uranium is more abundant than silver and we don't need much to power a nuclear reactor.
And yet we would still be dependent on an industry, just as we are today on coal, gas and oil.
I like how people take Fukushima and Chernobyl as examples for disasters. Please go look up how many people have died from those disasters. Please go check. I'll wait.
As others have already answered: far more people died than you claim here! How much land was made uninhabitable for centuries? How many animals would have to die? How much food would have to be destroyed because it was contaminated?
What happens if a tsunami hits an offshore wind farm? They collapse... And then? Do they have to be rebuilt?But you can do that because the land has not been contaminated
Furthermore, any energy production that has the potential to injure, harm or kill thousands of people cannot be considered safe. Just because nothing has happened so far.
There is so much uranium in the world. Even if we completely switched over to nuclear power and without improvements in Nuclear tech, our sun would have fizzled out and we still would have uranium left.
TL;DR: If we switched over to nuclear, we’d burn through the world’s reserves of accessible uranium ore in less than twenty years. Hopefully the sun will last a bit longer than that.
According to 2022 Red Book, there are around 8 million tonnes of Uranium which we could extract for $260 or less, per kg. The current price for uranium is around half that, FYI, so nuclear fuel prices would have at least doubled by the point we’re extracting that last million tonne.
Nuclear power plants use around 20 tonnes of uranium per TWh, according to the world nuclear association, and world energy consumption is around 25,000 TWh per year, according to the IEA. That would be half a million tonnes of uranium consumed per year. Meaning we would burn through the world’s reserve of reasonably accessible uranium in just sixteen years.
I agree it's safe but idk it's the best we currently have, I think that probably depends on locale.
Solar and wind (and maybe tidal?), with pumped hydro energy storage is probably cheaper, safer, and cleaner... But it requires access to a fair bit more water than a nuclear plant requires, at least initially.
But nuclear is still far better than using fossil fuels for baseline demand.
Land usage is also a huge concern with hydro power. Pumped hydro storage means permanently flooding an area to create the reservoir, which carries many above and beyond just the destruction of whatever was there before. The flooded land has vegetation on it, enough is now decaying under water. This can release all sorts of unpleasantness, most notably mercury.
I agree it absolutely has problems and I hope we come up with a better solution in the near future.
But it's currently the lesser evil. Even though nuclear plants don't need a lot of fuel, getting that fuel is still typically more damaging than creating a water reservoir, or using an existing natural reservoir.
Land usage is what makes nuclear the most ecologically sound solution. Solar and wind play their part. But for every acre of land, nuclear tops the chart of power produced per year. And when you're trying to sate the demand of high density housing and businesses in cities, energy density becomes important. Low carbon footprint is great for solar and wind but if you're also displacing ecosytems that would otherwise be sucking up carbon, its not as environmentally friendly as we'd like.
Are you displacing whole ecosystems, though?
How much do wind farms affect grasslands and prairies, etc? They'll have an impact for sure, but it's not like the whole place gets paved over.
And solar can get placed on roofs of existing structures. Or distributed so it doesn't affect any one area too much.
I have to admit idk much about sourcing the materials involved in building solar panels and windmills. Idk if they require destructive mining operations.
I imagine that a nuclear reactor would require more concrete, metal, and rate earth magnets that a solar/wind farm, but idk. I likewise don't know the details about mining and refining the various fissile material and nuclear poisons.
The other advantage of renewables is that it's distributed so it's naturally redundant. If it needs to get shut down (repairs, or a problem with the grid) it wont have a big impact.
I like nuclear, and it's certainly the better choice for some locations, but many locations seems better suited for renewable
Right, like I've said it's not the best solution everywhere. But where it's an option (which is many places) it's a better one. Not solar in the case of grasslands, probably wind. But you get the idea.
I'm not against renewables but utilizing them as our main source of energy just is not practical for long term, there are serious ecological issues that have been sidelined because of global warming/climate change. Things like rooftop solar only become viable in low density housing, but low density housing is also not good use of land.
I agree it's not the ideal solution, but it's better than most solutions we have, depending on location.
Rooftop solar doesn't only need to be on residential buildings, it can also be on industrial and commercial buildings, which take a significant land area.
One last benefit of most renewable energy that is related to its distributed nature: it's easy to slowly roll out update and replacements. If a new tech emerges you can quickly change your rollout plan to use the new tech, and replace the old tech a little bit at a time, without any energy disruption.
With mega-projects like nuclear reactors, you can't really change direction mid-construction, and you can't just replace the reactors as new tech comes online, because each reactor is a huge part of the energy supply and each one costs a fortune.
Also, according to the doc you shared of land-use, in-store wind power is nearly the same as nuclear, since the ecology between the windmills isn't destroyed.
So while I agree that nuclear absolutely has a place, and that renewables have some undesirable ecological repercussions, they're still generally an excellent solution.
The elephant in the room, though, is that all the renewable solutions I mentioned will require energy storage, to handle demand variation and production variation. The most reliable and economically feasible energy storage is pumped hydro, which will have a similar land usage to hydro power. On the upside, although it has a significant impact, it does not make the land ecological unviable, it just changes what ecosystem will thrive there - so sites must be chosen with care.
One of the saddest bits of the show was when they kinda just gave up talking about socio-economic issues and made the whole show revolve around Homer being a big dumb-dumb.
Some of the harshest criticism they had around nuclear power revolved around its privatization and profitization. A bunch of those early episodes amounted to people asking for reasonable and beneficial changes to how the plant was run, then having to fight tooth and nail with the company boss for even moderate reform.
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.
