My issue with nuclear energy isn't that it's dangerous or that it's inherently bad. The world needs a stable source of energy that compensates for wind and solar fluctuations anyways. For the current realistic alternatives that's either going to be nuclear or coal/oil/natural gas. We have nothing else for this purpose, end of discussion.
My problem is the assumption underlying this discussion about nuclear energy that it somehow will solve all of our problems or that it will somehow allow us to continue doing business as usual. That's categorically not the case. The climate crisis has multiple fronts that need to be dealt with and the emissions is just one of them. Even if we somehow managed to find the funds and resources to replace all non renewable energy with nuclear, we would still have solved just 10% of the problem, and considering that this cheap new energy will allow us to increase our activities and interventions in the planet, the situation will only worsen.
Nuclear energy is of course useful, but it's not the answer. Never has technology been the answer for a social and political issue. We can't "science and invent" our way out of this, it's not about the tech, it's about who decides how it will be used, who will profit from it, who and how much will be affected by it etc. If you want to advocate for a way to deal with the climate crisis you have to propose a complete social and political plan that will obviously include available technologies, so stop focusing on technologies and start focusing on society and who takes the decisions.
One simple example would be the following: no matter how green your energy is, if the trend in the US is to have increasingly bigger cars and no public transport, then the energy demands will always increase and no matter how many nuclear plants you build, they will only serve as an additional source and not as a replacement. So no matter how many plants you build, the climate will only deteriorate.
This is literally how the people in charge have decided it will work. Any new developing energy source that is invented serves only to increase the consumption, not to replace previous technologies. That's the case with solar and wind as well. So all of this discussion you all make about nuclear Vs oil or whatever is literally irrelevant. The problem is social and political, not technological.
Renewables are unreliable. That's a fact. Yes you have moments, days even weeks where they can deliver what is currently required. In total output. Not yet in delivers when you actually need it output.
Sure you can have 100% renewable generation for a 24hr period, but if your generation is during the day and your usage is spread into the night, you're not really covering your needs, no matter how good it looks on paper.
It is also your current usage. Now do the math and replace all fossil fuel usage with electric alternatives. Cars, buses, trucks, heating, cooking, etc. Now calculate just how much more renewables you need to cover all that in ideal circumstances.
Now do the same for windless winter days.
If we're going to step away from fossil fuels entirely, you're going to have to accept nuclear as an option. Thinking we'll manage only with renewables is a dream. While you dream, we're burning fossil fuels non-stop. Cuz that's reality.
You can have renewables with nuclear, or renewables with fossil fuels. You're actively choosing renewables with fossil fuels.
by insulating the roof of my house better i cut my useage of oil by more than 50%, next time i'll insulate the outer walls, and after that i'll switch to electric heating that would need just 20% of the original energy.
you forget that the energy consumption not neccesarily always rises. All appliances get better and better in efficiency, for example.
Yes, your total energy consumption drops, but your electricity consumption rises as a result. Electrification of stuff that relied on burning fossil fuels means that electricity consumption goes up even while total energy consumption stays the same or drops. I'm not necessarily saying that nuclear is the solution, but it's a solution that can at least buy us a few decades for renewables and energy storage to catch up to demand.
An EV will double your electricity usage. Look into the requirements for EV cargo transport. Swapping out all the diesel trucks, just the heavy transport will come close to doubling the national electricity needs. Add to that small vans and buses.
I urge you to actually do the math. You'll get a much much better understanding of the issue. Just pasting links to articles that look like they support your arguments adds to the dream.
The aim is to drop fossil fuels. Your goal should've been to embrace nuclear while increasing renewables. Atm you seem fine with just burning fossil fuels, killing the planet, cuz the alternative isn't renewable. GG.
Take a look at Germany, Belgium, etc. ditching nuclear because the green parties fought so hard for it. What are they doing now? Back to healthy healthy coal and gas. Thanks for helping kill the planet even faster in your zeal for exclusively renewable energy.
What most people dont' understand, i live in a part of germany, where eating of self collected mushrooms will radiate you, where boars in the forest are radioactive because of chernobyl 30 years ago...
There may be a point when we don't need nuclear, maybe once we dramatically level up our battery technology, but that point is not now, and probably not for the next 50 years
lol nuclear is really uneconommical, way too expensive and therefore really inefficient. You need 10-20 years to build a plant for energy 3 times more expensive than wind. For plants that still require mining. That produce waste we cannot store and still cannot reuse (except for one small test plant).
For plants that no insurance company want to insure and energy companies dont like to build without huge government subsidies.
I know lemmy and reddit have a hard on for nuclear energy because people who dont know anything about it think its cool. But this post is ridiculous even for lemmy standards.
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.
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.
Denmark looking decidedly not green this morning. Check the map regularly to understand why unreliable energy is actually just a way of increasing gas usage...
Okay, where is the comparison to nuclear? For that you have to build massive infrastructure, that costs billions, that no one want to insure, thats why it has to be backed by state money. After that the waste has to be managed by the state too, because no company wants to deal with the liability of radioactive waste for thousands of years at least, so that, too, comes out of the taxpayers pockets.
I don't like fossil fuels, but this is just plain stupid
(and also as a cherry on top, tschernobyl, fokushima)
You said Denmark had converted to green energy. I pointed out that they haven't done anything like that. You are now moving the goal posts and saying "where is the comparative essay defending nuclear power"...
If you must, France turned completely green in the 70s. So they've provided 50 years of clean energy. Its a classic story and not as simple as I'm going to make out, but still. Look at the map link in the last post - any area that stays green is either using hydro or nuclear. Hydro is great, but you need mountains and water.
But you still claiming nuclear is green is just crazy. There is still no place on earth that can hold nuclear waste. Especially not for the thousands of years that it would need. There is nothing clean about energy, that produces waste, that we can't even handle.
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?
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?
Just because it's safe doesn't mean it's the best we have right now.
It's massively expensive to set up
It's massively expensive to decommission at end of life
Almost half of the fuel you need to run them comes from a country dangerously close to Russia. (This one is slightly less of a thing now that Russia has bogged itself down in Ukraine)
It takes a long time to set up.
It has an image problem.
A combination of solar, wind, wave, tidal, more traditional hydro and geothermal (most of the cost with this is digging the holes. We've got a lot of deep old mines that can be repurposed) can easily be built to over capacity and or alongside adequate storage is the best solution in the here and now.
The problem with these arguments and the focus of debates is that they are based on nuclear energy from uranium, not thorium. Thorium is ubiquitous in nature, power centers are much easier to set up and can be small and the waste, while initially (a bit) more radioactive than uranium waste, loses it's radiation level much faster
The abundance of uranium and thorium is of the same magnitude.
The thing is economics. Uranium is cheap, and as long it is, we use the sources we have. As the peice of uranium rises other sources get economical including sea water extraction which is effectively renewable.
Uranium is a much scarer source compared to thorium. Uranium can also be used to create nuclear weapons, that's why other countries have difficulties using the tech because foreign powers are afraid of these consequences
Already India and chine have had working ones for many years. It's not speculative and I recommend you to research the tech. It's unfortunately not very present in western nuclear energy debates. Could be a political reason but that's just a dirty guess
I thought all thorium based reactor were still at the research stage. I made a quick search to see if there was any in actual use but couldn't find a source. If you have one please send it I'm really interested.
If they are still at the research stage then I'll wait until one is built at scale to decide whether they are a better alternative.
I would like to add, that though we have the means to store the radioactive waste safely, it's not done properly in many places. So it's also an organizational challenge.
Storage is not easy when you don't have massive amounts of free land. This is an ongoing debate in Europe, and in one particular country a leaky storage was discovered just a month or two ago. Again.
And there is no guarantee that what we build today is not going to be a massive liability in 50 or 200 or hell, 500 years. But the companies and people who are responsible will not even exist at this point.
People are kind of missing the point of the meme. The point is that Nuclear is down there along with renewables in safety and efficiency. It's lacking the egregious cover up in the original meme, even if it has legitimate concerns now. And due to society's ever increasing demand for electricity, we will heavily benefit from having a more scalable solution that doesn't require covering and potentially disrupting massive amounts of land before their operations can be scaled up to meet extraordinary demand. Wind turbines and solar panels don't stop working when we can't use their electricity either, so it's not like we can build too many of them or we risk creating complications out of peak hours. Many electrical networks aren't built to handle the loads. A nuclear reactor can be scaled down to use less fuel and put less strain on the electrical network when unneeded.
It should also be said that money can't always be spent equally everywhere. And depending on the labor required, there is also a limit to how manageable infrastructure is when it scales. The people that maintain and build solar panels, hydro, wind turbines, and nuclear, are not the same people. And if we acknowledge that climate change is an existential crisis, we must put our eggs in every basket we can, to diversify the energy transition. All four of the safest and most efficient solutions we have should be tapped into. But nuclear is often skipped because of outdated conceptions and fear. It does cost a lot and takes a while to build, but it fits certain shapes in the puzzle that none of the others do as well as it does.
Some personal thoughts:
My own country (The Netherlands) has despite a very vocal anti-nuclear movement in the 20th century completely flipped now to where the only parties not in favor of Nuclear are the Greens, who at times quote the fear as a reason not to do it. As someone who treats climate change as truly existential for our country that lies below projected sea levels, it makes them look unreasonable and not taking the issue seriously. We have limited land too, and a housing crisis on top of it. So land usage is a big pain point for renewables, and even if the land is unused, it is often so close to civilization that it does affect people's feelings of their surroundings when living near them, which might cause renewables to not make it as far as it could unrestricted. A nuclear reactor takes up fractions of the space, and can be relatively hidden from people.
All the other parties who heavily lean in to combating climate change at least acknowledge nuclear as an option that should (and are) being explored. And even the more climate skeptical parties see nuclear as something they could stand behind. Having broad support for certain actions is also important to actually getting things done. Our two new nuclear powered plants are expected to be running by 2035. Only ten years from now, ahead of our climate goals to be net-zero in 2040.
I think the option of nuclear needs to be on the table, and in some (or many) circumstances it might be the best fit.
Presently in Australia one of our two major parties is campaigning on a "pivot to nuclear" platform, but we're kind the polar opposite to the netherlands (both figuratively and literally?). The vast majority of Australia is sunny desert, girt by sea, with a tiny population in on the coast. My state is something like 2,000km by 1,250km, with about 2 million people. Nuclear just doesn't seem like a good fit right now.
My concern is that with this pivot to nuclear we basically just keep burning coal for the next 20 years while we're building nuclear plants.
It might be a great idea to build several reactors, while we furiously build out wind and solar.
There are some gargantuan solar hydrogen cracking projects not far from here in the planning phase which just sound amazing to me.
My own country (The Netherlands) has despite a very vocal anti-nuclear movement in the 20th century completely flipped now to where the only parties not in favor of Nuclear are the Greens, who at times quote the fear as a reason not to do it. As someone who treats climate change as truly existential for our country that lies below projected sea levels, it makes them look unreasonable and not taking the issue seriously.
I'm not from Netherlands, but very much belive this.
Most greens are very wierd. They claim to be against malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, but when it comes to solutions, they are against them(see golden rice). They are also mostly vegans, but when it comes to insulin, they would rather kill lots of pigs instead of scary-scary GMO yeast. Or when it comes to energy production, they rather would choose one with guaranteed dangers(coal has very nasty byproducts of burning) instead of potential.
I heard some greens in landlocked municipality(or whatever they call it in Britain) ruled against solar in favour of tidal. While same party in costal municipality ruled against of tidal.
I see biggest problem not in production, not in is it nuclear, but in is it buisness as usual. Capitalism knows no end to greed.
Most greens are very wierd. They claim to be against malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, but when it comes to solutions, they are against them(see golden rice). They are also mostly vegans, but when it comes to insulin, they would rather kill lots of pigs instead of scary-scary GMO yeast. Or when it comes to energy production, they rather would choose one with guaranteed dangers(coal has very nasty byproducts of burning) instead of potential.
I think this is probably because they represent a more dangerous and legitimate opposition to the powers that be, and, as a result, tend to be one of the most astroturfed groups on the planet. Couple that with a kind of extremism, where they will oppose golden rice or GMO yeast on the basis of evergreening IP laws (a fair complaint, imo), and then you can kind of see why they keep opposing things that are presented as solutions and keep getting hit with the terminally annoying "well, why don't you have any solutions, then?" style of criticism.
In germany we use more space for golf courses and christmas trees than renewables. Compared to the land used tongrow animal feed thats a drop in a bucket. You could eat a little less meat and have more than enough room for 100% renewables.
Sorry, but that is far from correct. Of course you can throttle wind and solar production if you want, but the problem of to much energy is a nice to have. You could create Hydrogen or desalinate water in large scales if you got energy left over
Regarding nuclear power: If you calculate the cost of nuclear and include that you need to store the waste for thousands of years it's not cheap either. And you also need to source the fuel from somewhere. Uranium is not abundant. And also it takes 20 years to build an new plant. By then it will be even lest cost effective. Rather continue with wind and solar and then batteries for the money.
If you calculate the cost of nuclear and include that you need to store the waste for thousands of years i
This hasn't been true for decades.
High Level Nuclear waste, aka spent fuel, can be run through breeder reactors or other new gen types to drastically reduce their radioactive half-life to decades and theoretically years with designs proposed in the last few years. Only reason reactors don't do this is lack of funding and demand for such things, the amount of high level waste produced is miniscule per year. And there are theories proposed already that could reduce ot further but nuclear phobia pushed by the oil lobby prevents proper funding and RnD to properly push those advancements to production.
You can certainly try to use the power as much as possible, or sell the energy to a country with a deficit. But the problem is that you would still need to invest a lot of money to make sure the grid can handle the excess if you build renewables to cover 100% of the grid demand for now and in the future. Centralized fuel sources require much less grid changes because it flows from one place and spreads from there, so infrastructure only needs to be improved close to the source. Renewables as decentralized power sources requires the grid to be strengthened anywhere they are placed, and often that is not practical, both in financial costs and in the engineers it takes to actually do that.
Would it be preferable? Yes. Would it happen before we already need to be fully carbon neutral? Often not.
I'd refer you to my other post about the situation in my country. We have a small warehouse of a few football fields which stores the highest radioactivity of unusable nuclear fuel, and still has more than enough space for centuries. The rest of the fuel is simply re-used until it's effectively regular waste. The time to build two new nuclear reactors here also costs only about 10 years, not 20.
Rather continue with wind and solar and then batteries for the money.
All of these things should happen regardless of nuclear progress. And they do happen. But again, building renewables isn't just about the price.
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.
