In the 1990s, the NRC had to “take repeated actions to address defective welds on dry casks that led to cracks and quality assurance problems; helium had leaked into some casks, increasing temperatures and causing accelerated fuel corrosion”.[11]
With the zeroing of the federal budget for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada in 2011, more nuclear waste began being stored in dry casks. Many of these casks are stored in coastal or lakeside regions where a salt air environment exists, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology posited that corrosion in these environments could occur in 30 years or less, while the NRC was studying whether the casks could be used for 100 years as some hoped.[12]
Impervious to absolutely anything, except a little helium, or slightly salty air.
Forcing nuclear down our throats while renewables are a thing is so wild. And people actually defend nuclear.
You want mining of sparse minerals by workers in inhuman conditions? Check
You want a contamination which will exist for longer than the oldest human build structure?
Check (because the barrels you made made indestructible, just dont test this pls)
You want centralized energy way more expansive than solar or wind?
Check
There are literally no upsides of nuclear against renewables and a battery.
There's a lot of fossil fuel money pushing the nuclear cart. Nuclear plants take enough time to build that they are a good enough delay against renewables for the current crop of fossil fuel executives
It's nice that the pro-nuke comments replying to you are gathering down votes
That's beside the point. Nuclear isn't sustainable on the long run, period.And solar can potentially generate all the electricity needed and more by itself.
it isn't, transmission is a complex thing to do lol, my country had a full blackout last year because a cascading failure caused by a transmission line.
Nuclear fuel will last long enough for us to both have nuclear fission and the capacity to space mine materials.
solar doesn't work in places that don't have land available to be turned into solar farms, here in chile they do a lot of solar, and cool melted salt solar too, but is far north in the Atacama and they have to bring it in, wich is a huge bottle neck, A nuclear power plant in Santiago would relieve a lot the strain in the grid.
Yes, transmission is a complex thing to do, and that's why more funds should used to improve research in that direction, rather than wasting hundreds of billions on ticking time bombs, so that mining company owners can get richer while making us sicker.
1 hour of sunlight that hits the sunlit hemisphere, contains enough energy to satisfy the needs of the whole planet for 1 year. That's how much solar is better than nuclear.
I really can't believe that in 2026, the idea of generating energy by boiling water, is still considered "advanced tech" just because they wanna use a different fuel. Lol
Solar still uses boiling water, thermosolar at least, that has a lot of benefits over the photovoltaic cell, as it can generate energy steadily and even trough the night, here in chile they built cerro dominador, quite impressive thing.
it depends on the geography of the place, in my country it would be reasonably a huge challenge to build farms over the sea because of the geography of here (it's like a underwater cliff)
and still, I'm heavily pro renewables, but that doesn't I won't be pro nuclear also, both are crucial tech to de-carbonize the world.
Photovoltaic is the future, it'sprettyy much unarguably the only technology that can create energy without moving parts or without any sort of burning.
You don't get any more futuristic than this.
The only problem with photovoltaic and wind is that they've been actively boycotted.
Here in the UK energy providers habitually stop their own wind turbines just because otherwise the price of energy will get too low. That's how fucked up the system is. And nuclear is nothing more than an astute way for these capitalist pigs in control of the energy sector to keep making money from something that should be free already.
I fully agree that solar will be the majority of electricity produced in the near future, but photovoltaic has the disadvantage of following the sun, and honestly, chermical batteries aren't really the solution (and I'm saying this when my country is one of the biggest lithium producers in the world) Gravity batteries are, but surprise surprise, they are water turbines and water pumps lol, they will last way longer than a chermical battery anyways.
Thermosolar has the molten salt as a buffer between the sun and the electricity, you can use it to produce energy steadily, even in the night, wich solves the problem of having to build gravity damns and the associated risk of them.
I'm confident studying mech, because it isn't going away anytime soon.
and yeah, I full agree that we need to reform the power grid and enact at least partial statization.
but still, nuclear is a good tech that can produce clean energy right where is needed, we shouldn't discard it just because renewables are quite O.P.
Renawbles are capable of generating a ton of energy manageable distances from where they are used in most cases, even for the cases which they are not it is orders of magnitudes cheaper and better for environment if you make green hydrogen, ship it to where its needed and convert it back into current where you need it considered the absurd amounts of time and cost it takes to manage nuclear waste. Not even considering the cost to mine and ship nuclear fuel, build the reactor and safely dispose of it at the end of its lifespan as its miniscule compared to maintain any sort of storage building for a time longer than the time between humanitys first building and now.
Mining is mostly done by people living under slave like conditions in poor countries.
Even thinking having a energy source which needs to CONTINUOUSLY BURN MINED RECOURCES to keep outputting any energy at all is superior to a energy source which NEEDS MINED RESOURCES ONCE TO CONTINUOUSLY output energy until broken by external forces shows the absurdity of your argument
Solar panels need silicium (literally sand) and bor, apart from some plastics and structural metal and glass. Those are way easier and cleaner to mine then radioactive materials, and bor is needed in really small amounts, AND IT DOESNT GET BURNED, YOU CAN REUSE IT.
3.Thinking that smashing a train against something tells you anything about the properties of a material when exposed to time spans of degradation many orders of magnitude bigger than the time humans even started researching material properties....I dont even know where to start with this "argument" its bs on so many levels
I live in a thinrd world country, and it angers me to no end when they try to take this moral stand when a lot of times they're the ones who didn't let us all develop in the first place lol.
My country depends on it's mining industry, the biggest copper mining country in the world and i think the 2nd on lithium, they say it's the wage of chile, most of the copper is extracted by the State owned CODELCO, wich money goes to schools and hospitals, and even the one who is mined privately is taxed and has to pay royalties that go to help the people.
Miners aren't even poorly paid for Chilean standards, and they have benefits, they're strongly unionized lol, and mines here have an extremely high tech level, making people don't have to go to risky places, a lot of mines are totally automated, where robots extract the material and take it out, while their operators sit comfortably in a control room in the city.
So don't come to lecture me on these "poor people in third world countries" because you know nothing, you are a firstworlder who had benefited from colonization and political meddling in our affairs, now that we're finally advancing, and making a better country for ourselves, you come to say this thing? Bruh.
Im not a nuclear bro, but a vast majority of the planet's Uranium is mined in Australia and Canada and both countries have pretty massive reserves. They have strict regulations and safety surrounding uranium operations. Naturally occurring uranium doesnt even pose much safety risk on its own, its the Radon that is generated by decay that causes problems for humans. Im not too familiar with how uranium mining is done but I imagine Radon risks can be mitigated pretty effectively with ventilation.
i agree with the anti-nuclear, but the mining conditions are really far less of a problem with uranium… canada and australia are #2 and #4 in the world respectively
uranium is relatively plentiful, and hugely energy-dense so most places have some that’s viable to extract, and it’s not worth cheaping out on costs to save a couple of $ buying from slave mines given the potential backlash
i actually wouldn’t be surprised if uranium mining is one of the best jobs in the developing world because if they actually want to sell their product they’d have to market their working conditions
Not true. Nuclear works 24/7 without the need for battery storage and the cost and environmental damage associated with manufacturing batteries. Plus, it can be dialed up and down in response to demand.
We need to use all available tools to replace fossil fuels ASAP. Renewables and nuclear.
You got mislead my dude. Probably because there's lot of propaganda for nuclear as it is needed to offload costs of building nuclear weapons, so especially USA, France and China are campaigning hard.
We dont need another finite fossil resource oligarchs can use to control us, we need to change societies habits so it complies with energy production.
For the actually relevant parts its easy enough to store the energy. Batteries are not the only possibility, water elevation, hydrogen, pressure cells just to name a few. But even if batteries were the only ones, it's still worth manufacturing them compared to the costs of managing nuclear waste for timescales longer than human build structures exists.
Did a medieval person know what wages today would be? No
Do you know what the nuclear end storage would cost in 1000 years? No
But even for the time we can for see, in the best case scenario its an economically bad decission, in the worst case we poison the whole planet to a degree where no human life can exist.
Where's an example for an operating nuclear power-plant that can be dialed down to match demand?
Afaik they have lots of momentum (for days even), and even their propenents argue for them being critical for providing a base supply^1^. Never have I heard anyone claiming they'd be good for matching fluctuating demand. Can you back that up?
Or are you getting your anti-reneweblaes lobbying talking points mixed up? That argument is usually used for natural gas plants.
^1^ which doesn't make sense in a renewables dominated grid.
That's a super basic view on the science of nuclear power. As an engineer, I need a lot more than that, because it needs a lot more to put basic principles into working projects.
So, is there a nuclear powerplant, that exists outside of some powerpoint slides, that is actually used to match fluctuating generation from other energy sources and/or fluctuating demands?
All of the ones I know are/were used to provide a base supply by running more or less 24/7 at their designated output, not least because they need to do that to be even somehow economically feasible.
They do it in France. The term to google is “load following” nuclear power plants. All new ones have the capability.
Most are used for base load power generation, but this is for economic reasons (getting your money’s worth out of an expensive-to-build facility), not technical feasibility.
Natural gas is a cheaper load following alternative, but that isn’t an option when we’re talking about replacing fossil fuels.
I only had the time to read the executive summary of this thing, but I learned a bit more about nuclear power plants.
It's still not enough for me to evaluate how well that can integrate with a grid dominated by renewables (can the load following be fast enough, to match wind and solar fluctuations) but still good to know more.
nuclear costs a shit load of money up front and has such massive NIMBY pushback… it’s great for the fossil fuel industry to argue for because it’s politically impossible to actually implement: we need more nuclear! stop with all the renewables! leads to only 1 thing… talk about nuclear and no more renewables
meanwhile, batteries really don’t produce much environmental damage… that’s just straight up misinformation… and the bonus with batteries is nice the materielsd are mined, you can recycle them back to brand new forever… you don’t have to keep mining all the lithium; just enough to keep up with new capacity
Naw. I was once enrolled in an Energy/Climate-focussed Masters degree, and scientific consensus for the goal generally seemed to range from "mostly renewables + a tiny bit of nuclear" to "all renewables". Nuclear feels like this amazing hack but it's expensive, and the storage problem, while sometimes overstated, is also often understated or falsely misrepresented as solved.
In Australia solar works so well and nuclear is so inappropriate* that now batteries are so cheap you don't hear informed opinions other than renewables and batteries.
*because the Aussie grid on the east coast is a line north/south, and the population is too small, we can't use the power of two reactors because too few people, we don't want a solution where one generator is powering both Melbourne and Brisbane, with nuclear you need enough generators to be able to take one down completely for maintenance
Enrolled in an energy/"climate-focused" masters degree funded by British Petrol.
The only downside in nuclear is plants being a sensitive target in warfare.
And earthquakes, and tsunamis, and hurricanes, and floods, and any other unforeseen circumstance which will result in rising level of cancer and lowering life expectancy for generations in the centuries to come. But yes who cares?! Glowy thing go brrrrrrr!
No it's not! It's a minuscule step forward which will achieve no change whatsoever for the average person except an INCREASE in the amount of carcinogenic compounds in the atmosphere!
The massive step forward would be not needing boiling water and not needing to burn any fuel whatsoever to produce energy. That would be a "massive" step forward, not nuclear.
This is a joke, right? I grew up near one of those "safe" underground disposals and it's a disaster. Why risk that when there are so mich cleaner optional available today?
I think it's a pro-nuclear energy meme, joking on people's misplaced worry and minimising the danger of stored nuclear waste
I feel that pro nuclear stuff is trying to make people less interested in renewable energy despite a city being able to add more energy to its grid in weeks with solar and wind backed by batteries compared to two decades for nuclear, but also you need enough because every few decades it needs to shut down for months to be refuelled at enormous expense.
Wind power waste is inert, solar power waste is highly recyclable
They say "keep using coal and oil, because nuclear is the only good electric power supply and will surely come real soon"
More and more words are apparently becoming to hard to use correctly for a big part of people online. This is one that I almost never saw anyone getting wrong until a couple of years ago and it's becoming more and more common, same with writing "cloth/cloths" instead of "clothe/clothes". It's infuriating.
becoming too hard! English spelling makes no sense anyway, but the mistake I understand the least is people writing "would of", in my mind it sounds too different from "would've", but I don't know, maybe for some particular mother tongue they sound similar (or maybe they really do sound similar, and I say them wrong)
The advantage of spelling correctly is people actually do understand you. When you use the wrong word it moves focus from your joke and onto the word that is hard to parse
If we didn't fight Nuclear energy for decades we wouldn't have been in half as much trouble as we are in now. But the oil companies won with their smear campaigns.
Renewable energy is cheaper now, but that wasn't always the case. Also nuclear can be part of solving some of the issues with renewable energy. We can build massive battery banks and double our number of solar farms so that we have power when the sun goes down or we can reduce the need and incorporate nuclear
Building out capacity to transport a massive amount of energy over thousands of kilometers isn't really that great either. Also, when it comes to night this is kinda not possible to avoid
Ah, that must be why first world countries like France are trying to export their nuclear waste into third world countries, after they were forced to stop exporting it into Russia...
If it's so safe, why have they been closing down every single high level waste permanent storage site over the last decade?
I would love to ask everyone who opposes nuclear power one question. It's a really simple question, you can Google it. I've never had an opponent of nuclear power answer the question, because it brings everything into perspective.
How much spent nuclear fuel is there in the entire world? What is the total amount of long term waste that the entire history of nuclear power generation has created? If you piled it up, how big of a pile would it form?
IIRC, coal and gas plants give off more radiation per kWh than nuclear, it's just that they dump it into the atmosphere along with millions of tonnes of other far more dangerous material.
For coal: into the air and settling into the land around the power plant. People who live near coal power plants are exposed to a lot more radiation than those who live near any other sort of generator
Nonsense, fision energy is expensive and dangerous.
Only in Germany there are over 12.000 tons of radioactive waste and nobody knows where to stored it secure for the next 100.000 years.
It's depending on third countries to import the needed Uranium
Indestructibles containers in a geological stable vault is a bad joke, it don't exist, at least not enough for all the waste, not even for the already existing.
A nuclear reactor has a life span of ~50 years max, after this it need to be eliminated, a process of over 10 years for descontamination and elimination of more radioactive waste with a cost of billions of $, paid by the country, as said, by you, not by the company. Means 50 years energy and >50.000 years problems.
Nuclear is the best, but only if we have an working fusion reactor, means, maybe in 10-20 years. Meanwhile the fision energy is sponsored by certain lobbies and the weapon industry, they are the real reason.
In Spain the energy costs for the user are ~14 cts/kWh at some hours even free (the lowest costs in the EU), thanks to the intensive use of renevable energy, blocked often by fossil and nuclear lobbies in other countries.
The goal of this technology is to reduce the volume of radioactive waste that requires deep geological disposal. Rosatom indicated that eliminating minor actinides could allow nuclear waste to reach radiation equivalence with the original uranium feedstock hundreds of times faster than natural decay.
I'm surprised by all the angry comments of people on this thread, people don't realize the true potential modern nuclear energy has, to produce a lot of energy and just right besides where that energy is needed, one of the biggest problems of renewables is that you don't get to choose where they are produced, so in most cases it implies transmission lines, very high capacity ones and very long ones, my country recently had a country wide outage caused by the failure of one of those that caused a cascading failure.
I'm not saying that renewables aren't incredible tech, they are, they really do, like they're one of the best sources of energy available, but they aren't perfect, and them being complemented with nuclear would do a big deal of good, as I said before nuclear has it's own unique strengths that can help out a lot.
And also I see a lot of people here talking from outright ignorance about the state of the arts of the tech, it has advanced a lot since the 1950's lol, and repeat the same arguments, forever debunked, people do about nuclear that frustrating, Fukushima and Chernobyl were both plants with stupidly old tech, run by clowns and ignoring really well known risks for the sake of the lulz, even when all nuclear accidents combined, the tech has killed a fraction of people than what hidro has killed, modern tech is heaps more advanced and has included everything needed for that sort of accident to be impossible, even nuclear waste is a solved problem, the only thing stopping it from fully materializing is political will (Altough is kind of a blessing in hiding because now tech to use spent fuel seems to be the future also).
TBF, historically most nations allow "temporary" storage of spent nuclear fuel cells in perpetually filled pools or running water, which have the potential to run out and cause a nuclear apocalypse via irradiating everything on the surface of the earth. Currently millions of spent rods are stored "temporarily" in such pools which all together contain as much Cesium-137 as 30 Chernobyls in the USA alone.
It gets talked about a lot in "what if" scenarios about human extinction, because if Humanity died out then those pools will dry up and everything else will die alongside us.
Nuclear has been artificially made way more expensive than it should be.
For one part, why is it the only energy source that has to take care of its waste? (LCOE includes this cost, and I'm not saying they shouldn't, I'm saying other sources should too.) Coal can spew waste out (including radioactive waste) and they don't have to handle it. Wind just throws out blades and doesn't have to deal with them. Etc.
The insane strictness on designs and safety are also far higher than they should be. A lot of its based on a linear no threshold model of radiation safety, which has been disproven., which dramatically increases costs.
Even still, LCOE for nuclear is pretty competitive in the US, and the US is one of the worst places for nuclear, as our dirty energy companies have easily been able to purchase laws to increase the cost of nuclear, so they can't compete as much. Sort this by LCOE and see how many cheap nuclear is for most nations.
I think the average person vastly over estimates how much waste is produced. If I recall the stat was that the entire world's nuclear waste could fit in a football field. That's really tiny.
I've helped build nuclear waste caskets, nothing is perfect but the amount of attention put into making it safe is incredible! The layers (and quality) of stainless steel welds would put your average steel bridge to shame....
But fission will always be limited (as in non-renewable). If everything was powered by nuclear, I'm sure we'd see even more awefull mining operations. Also, fusion should in theory be much better, if the thermodynamics of it end up working.
it literally isn't, why people are saying this? the fossil part comes from being, well fossilized organic material, hence hidrocarbon rich, nuclear isn't tthat, it's not renewable but is clean energy.
If you add up the total number of deaths since nuclear inception in the 50s then ramp up the attributed deaths to the maximum number of possible deaths, the total rounding up, is 102,000. Coal alone exceeds that by estimates millions every year.
“Indestructible”?
HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Thanks for the laugh, pal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY446h4pZdc
Pretty much, yeah
Impervious to absolutely anything, except a little helium, or slightly salty air.
That video is strange marketing nonsense. Running a train doesn't apply the same forces and wear-down as nature will, just ask your mother.
so a train will be less terrible than to be stored in seismically inactive rock?
yes, see: https://lemmy.cafe/comment/17134894
When you run a test, you want to minimize variables and keep as many things constant as possible between tests if you want to prove something.
Amazingly there are not a lot of constants between seismically inactive rock and a fucking train
My momma doesn't work in hazardous materials handling, I do. So maybe your mom can ask me?
Forcing nuclear down our throats while renewables are a thing is so wild. And people actually defend nuclear.
You want mining of sparse minerals by workers in inhuman conditions? Check
You want a contamination which will exist for longer than the oldest human build structure? Check (because the barrels you made made indestructible, just dont test this pls)
You want centralized energy way more expansive than solar or wind? Check
There are literally no upsides of nuclear against renewables and a battery.
There's a lot of fossil fuel money pushing the nuclear cart. Nuclear plants take enough time to build that they are a good enough delay against renewables for the current crop of fossil fuel executives
It's nice that the pro-nuke comments replying to you are gathering down votes
Bruh.
Nuclear is capable of generating a ton of energy right besides where is used, renewables have to be transmitted absurdly long distances in most cases.
And mining is every day more automated, sending robots to dig down the materials, and even then, is not like renewables don't need mining also lol.
And yes, they test it, here they're smashing a train full speed to one of the canisters to test it's safety
Renewables for my house are on my roof. That's not far. My nearest solar farm is ten kilometres away, which is also close.
That's beside the point. Nuclear isn't sustainable on the long run, period.And solar can potentially generate all the electricity needed and more by itself.
it isn't, transmission is a complex thing to do lol, my country had a full blackout last year because a cascading failure caused by a transmission line.
Nuclear fuel will last long enough for us to both have nuclear fission and the capacity to space mine materials.
solar doesn't work in places that don't have land available to be turned into solar farms, here in chile they do a lot of solar, and cool melted salt solar too, but is far north in the Atacama and they have to bring it in, wich is a huge bottle neck, A nuclear power plant in Santiago would relieve a lot the strain in the grid.
Yes, transmission is a complex thing to do, and that's why more funds should used to improve research in that direction, rather than wasting hundreds of billions on ticking time bombs, so that mining company owners can get richer while making us sicker.
1 hour of sunlight that hits the sunlit hemisphere, contains enough energy to satisfy the needs of the whole planet for 1 year. That's how much solar is better than nuclear.
I really can't believe that in 2026, the idea of generating energy by boiling water, is still considered "advanced tech" just because they wanna use a different fuel. Lol
And no, solar doesn't need land.
Solar still uses boiling water, thermosolar at least, that has a lot of benefits over the photovoltaic cell, as it can generate energy steadily and even trough the night, here in chile they built cerro dominador, quite impressive thing.
it depends on the geography of the place, in my country it would be reasonably a huge challenge to build farms over the sea because of the geography of here (it's like a underwater cliff)
and still, I'm heavily pro renewables, but that doesn't I won't be pro nuclear also, both are crucial tech to de-carbonize the world.
Photovoltaic is the future, it'sprettyy much unarguably the only technology that can create energy without moving parts or without any sort of burning.
You don't get any more futuristic than this. The only problem with photovoltaic and wind is that they've been actively boycotted.
Here in the UK energy providers habitually stop their own wind turbines just because otherwise the price of energy will get too low. That's how fucked up the system is. And nuclear is nothing more than an astute way for these capitalist pigs in control of the energy sector to keep making money from something that should be free already.
I fully agree that solar will be the majority of electricity produced in the near future, but photovoltaic has the disadvantage of following the sun, and honestly, chermical batteries aren't really the solution (and I'm saying this when my country is one of the biggest lithium producers in the world) Gravity batteries are, but surprise surprise, they are water turbines and water pumps lol, they will last way longer than a chermical battery anyways.
Thermosolar has the molten salt as a buffer between the sun and the electricity, you can use it to produce energy steadily, even in the night, wich solves the problem of having to build gravity damns and the associated risk of them.
I'm confident studying mech, because it isn't going away anytime soon.
and yeah, I full agree that we need to reform the power grid and enact at least partial statization.
but still, nuclear is a good tech that can produce clean energy right where is needed, we shouldn't discard it just because renewables are quite O.P.
No one has done solar thermal for a decade. Your position is so out of date.
There are floating wind generators
You seem ill informed
you would be wrong, cerro dominador on chile started operations recently.
I
Bruh
Renawbles are capable of generating a ton of energy manageable distances from where they are used in most cases, even for the cases which they are not it is orders of magnitudes cheaper and better for environment if you make green hydrogen, ship it to where its needed and convert it back into current where you need it considered the absurd amounts of time and cost it takes to manage nuclear waste. Not even considering the cost to mine and ship nuclear fuel, build the reactor and safely dispose of it at the end of its lifespan as its miniscule compared to maintain any sort of storage building for a time longer than the time between humanitys first building and now.
Mining is mostly done by people living under slave like conditions in poor countries. Even thinking having a energy source which needs to CONTINUOUSLY BURN MINED RECOURCES to keep outputting any energy at all is superior to a energy source which NEEDS MINED RESOURCES ONCE TO CONTINUOUSLY output energy until broken by external forces shows the absurdity of your argument
Solar panels need silicium (literally sand) and bor, apart from some plastics and structural metal and glass. Those are way easier and cleaner to mine then radioactive materials, and bor is needed in really small amounts, AND IT DOESNT GET BURNED, YOU CAN REUSE IT.
3.Thinking that smashing a train against something tells you anything about the properties of a material when exposed to time spans of degradation many orders of magnitude bigger than the time humans even started researching material properties....I dont even know where to start with this "argument" its bs on so many levels
About the point 2.
I live in a thinrd world country, and it angers me to no end when they try to take this moral stand when a lot of times they're the ones who didn't let us all develop in the first place lol.
My country depends on it's mining industry, the biggest copper mining country in the world and i think the 2nd on lithium, they say it's the wage of chile, most of the copper is extracted by the State owned CODELCO, wich money goes to schools and hospitals, and even the one who is mined privately is taxed and has to pay royalties that go to help the people.
Miners aren't even poorly paid for Chilean standards, and they have benefits, they're strongly unionized lol, and mines here have an extremely high tech level, making people don't have to go to risky places, a lot of mines are totally automated, where robots extract the material and take it out, while their operators sit comfortably in a control room in the city.
So don't come to lecture me on these "poor people in third world countries" because you know nothing, you are a firstworlder who had benefited from colonization and political meddling in our affairs, now that we're finally advancing, and making a better country for ourselves, you come to say this thing? Bruh.
Im not a nuclear bro, but a vast majority of the planet's Uranium is mined in Australia and Canada and both countries have pretty massive reserves. They have strict regulations and safety surrounding uranium operations. Naturally occurring uranium doesnt even pose much safety risk on its own, its the Radon that is generated by decay that causes problems for humans. Im not too familiar with how uranium mining is done but I imagine Radon risks can be mitigated pretty effectively with ventilation.
i agree with the anti-nuclear, but the mining conditions are really far less of a problem with uranium… canada and australia are #2 and #4 in the world respectively
uranium is relatively plentiful, and hugely energy-dense so most places have some that’s viable to extract, and it’s not worth cheaping out on costs to save a couple of $ buying from slave mines given the potential backlash
i actually wouldn’t be surprised if uranium mining is one of the best jobs in the developing world because if they actually want to sell their product they’d have to market their working conditions
Not true. Nuclear works 24/7 without the need for battery storage and the cost and environmental damage associated with manufacturing batteries. Plus, it can be dialed up and down in response to demand.
We need to use all available tools to replace fossil fuels ASAP. Renewables and nuclear.
You got mislead my dude. Probably because there's lot of propaganda for nuclear as it is needed to offload costs of building nuclear weapons, so especially USA, France and China are campaigning hard.
We dont need another finite fossil resource oligarchs can use to control us, we need to change societies habits so it complies with energy production. For the actually relevant parts its easy enough to store the energy. Batteries are not the only possibility, water elevation, hydrogen, pressure cells just to name a few. But even if batteries were the only ones, it's still worth manufacturing them compared to the costs of managing nuclear waste for timescales longer than human build structures exists.
Did a medieval person know what wages today would be? No Do you know what the nuclear end storage would cost in 1000 years? No But even for the time we can for see, in the best case scenario its an economically bad decission, in the worst case we poison the whole planet to a degree where no human life can exist.
Where's an example for an operating nuclear power-plant that can be dialed down to match demand?
Afaik they have lots of momentum (for days even), and even their propenents argue for them being critical for providing a base supply^1^. Never have I heard anyone claiming they'd be good for matching fluctuating demand. Can you back that up?
Or are you getting your anti-reneweblaes lobbying talking points mixed up? That argument is usually used for natural gas plants.
^1^ which doesn't make sense in a renewables dominated grid.
The closer the rods are to each other, the more collisions occur per unit time, and the more heat is generated.
That's a super basic view on the science of nuclear power. As an engineer, I need a lot more than that, because it needs a lot more to put basic principles into working projects.
So, is there a nuclear powerplant, that exists outside of some powerpoint slides, that is actually used to match fluctuating generation from other energy sources and/or fluctuating demands?
All of the ones I know are/were used to provide a base supply by running more or less 24/7 at their designated output, not least because they need to do that to be even somehow economically feasible.
They do it in France. The term to google is “load following” nuclear power plants. All new ones have the capability.
Most are used for base load power generation, but this is for economic reasons (getting your money’s worth out of an expensive-to-build facility), not technical feasibility.
Natural gas is a cheaper load following alternative, but that isn’t an option when we’re talking about replacing fossil fuels.
Kudos for a measured response to my sometimes snarky tone.
https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2021/12/technical-and-economic-aspects-of-load-following-with-nuclear-power-plants_30eb3b02/29e7df00-en.pdf
I only had the time to read the executive summary of this thing, but I learned a bit more about nuclear power plants.
It's still not enough for me to evaluate how well that can integrate with a grid dominated by renewables (can the load following be fast enough, to match wind and solar fluctuations) but still good to know more.
nuclear costs a shit load of money up front and has such massive NIMBY pushback… it’s great for the fossil fuel industry to argue for because it’s politically impossible to actually implement: we need more nuclear! stop with all the renewables! leads to only 1 thing… talk about nuclear and no more renewables
meanwhile, batteries really don’t produce much environmental damage… that’s just straight up misinformation… and the bonus with batteries is nice the materielsd are mined, you can recycle them back to brand new forever… you don’t have to keep mining all the lithium; just enough to keep up with new capacity
Naw. I was once enrolled in an Energy/Climate-focussed Masters degree, and scientific consensus for the goal generally seemed to range from "mostly renewables + a tiny bit of nuclear" to "all renewables". Nuclear feels like this amazing hack but it's expensive, and the storage problem, while sometimes overstated, is also often understated or falsely misrepresented as solved.
In Australia solar works so well and nuclear is so inappropriate* that now batteries are so cheap you don't hear informed opinions other than renewables and batteries.
*because the Aussie grid on the east coast is a line north/south, and the population is too small, we can't use the power of two reactors because too few people, we don't want a solution where one generator is powering both Melbourne and Brisbane, with nuclear you need enough generators to be able to take one down completely for maintenance
Enrolled in an energy/"climate-focused" masters degree funded by British Petrol. The only downside in nuclear is plants being a sensitive target in warfare.
And earthquakes, and tsunamis, and hurricanes, and floods, and any other unforeseen circumstance which will result in rising level of cancer and lowering life expectancy for generations in the centuries to come. But yes who cares?! Glowy thing go brrrrrrr!
It's talking about ignorance honestly, hidro has killed way more people.
You realise that death isn't the only bad thing that can happen to you? I'd say crippling you and future generations for life is worse than death.
And that's why replacing coal with fission is a massive step forwards!
No it's not! It's a minuscule step forward which will achieve no change whatsoever for the average person except an INCREASE in the amount of carcinogenic compounds in the atmosphere!
The massive step forward would be not needing boiling water and not needing to burn any fuel whatsoever to produce energy. That would be a "massive" step forward, not nuclear.
And btw, water vapour is a greenhouse gas too.
Ah yes bp famously wants to replace all fossil fuels with renewables. good point /s
This is a joke, right? I grew up near one of those "safe" underground disposals and it's a disaster. Why risk that when there are so mich cleaner optional available today?
nuclear waste vs lead and iron
Why people here argue about cost or energy potential or resource mine of nuclear? Meme only about fossil waste extremely normalized?
I think it's a pro-nuclear energy meme, joking on people's misplaced worry and minimising the danger of stored nuclear waste
I feel that pro nuclear stuff is trying to make people less interested in renewable energy despite a city being able to add more energy to its grid in weeks with solar and wind backed by batteries compared to two decades for nuclear, but also you need enough because every few decades it needs to shut down for months to be refuelled at enormous expense.
Wind power waste is inert, solar power waste is highly recyclable
They say "keep using coal and oil, because nuclear is the only good electric power supply and will surely come real soon"
Ohh, not understand that way. Thank you.
In germany argument most about replace fossil with nuclear and a lot renewable. Not build nuclear instead renewable.
Can't be funny everything must be serious.:-P
BREATHE*
More and more words are apparently becoming to hard to use correctly for a big part of people online. This is one that I almost never saw anyone getting wrong until a couple of years ago and it's becoming more and more common, same with writing "cloth/cloths" instead of "clothe/clothes". It's infuriating.
becoming too hard! English spelling makes no sense anyway, but the mistake I understand the least is people writing "would of", in my mind it sounds too different from "would've", but I don't know, maybe for some particular mother tongue they sound similar (or maybe they really do sound similar, and I say them wrong)
Only for grammar Facists. You know what people mean,
The advantage of spelling correctly is people actually do understand you. When you use the wrong word it moves focus from your joke and onto the word that is hard to parse
Sometimes, yeah. Other times I have to re read the sentence two or three times before I figure out what it's supposed to say.
So yeah, basically fuck off with your "gRaMaR fAsCiSt" shit if you actually want to be understood.
Indestructible like the Runit dome?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-15/cracks-appear-in-runit-dome-amid-sea-level-rise/106423684
Get lost with your expensive nuclear energy. Renewables produce MUCH cheaper energy.
If we didn't fight Nuclear energy for decades we wouldn't have been in half as much trouble as we are in now. But the oil companies won with their smear campaigns.
Renewable energy is cheaper now, but that wasn't always the case. Also nuclear can be part of solving some of the issues with renewable energy. We can build massive battery banks and double our number of solar farms so that we have power when the sun goes down or we can reduce the need and incorporate nuclear
But for a stable network you need to account for times with no sun and no wind.
Batteries
If we had a stable and international network, there would be not a time without sun or wind.
Tell me, are the room temperature superconductors with us in this room now?
Building out capacity to transport a massive amount of energy over thousands of kilometers isn't really that great either. Also, when it comes to night this is kinda not possible to avoid
You realise that the sun never goes away right? Half of the earth is illuminated 24/7
But half the earth is in darkness at once? You want to really transport solar energy across half the earth at mass?
I mean we do transport phone and internet signal all a roundthen world via big cables under the ocean already. That's non an impossible challenge.
Ah, that must be why first world countries like France are trying to export their nuclear waste into third world countries, after they were forced to stop exporting it into Russia...
If it's so safe, why have they been closing down every single high level waste permanent storage site over the last decade?
because ppl act over irrational fear and lobby their politicians to close perfectly safe sites.
I would love to ask everyone who opposes nuclear power one question. It's a really simple question, you can Google it. I've never had an opponent of nuclear power answer the question, because it brings everything into perspective.
How much spent nuclear fuel is there in the entire world? What is the total amount of long term waste that the entire history of nuclear power generation has created? If you piled it up, how big of a pile would it form?
doesnt coal emissions have some radiation in it too?
IIRC, coal and gas plants give off more radiation per kWh than nuclear, it's just that they dump it into the atmosphere along with millions of tonnes of other far more dangerous material.
For coal: into the air and settling into the land around the power plant. People who live near coal power plants are exposed to a lot more radiation than those who live near any other sort of generator
Nonsense, fision energy is expensive and dangerous.
Only in Germany there are over 12.000 tons of radioactive waste and nobody knows where to stored it secure for the next 100.000 years. It's depending on third countries to import the needed Uranium Indestructibles containers in a geological stable vault is a bad joke, it don't exist, at least not enough for all the waste, not even for the already existing. A nuclear reactor has a life span of ~50 years max, after this it need to be eliminated, a process of over 10 years for descontamination and elimination of more radioactive waste with a cost of billions of $, paid by the country, as said, by you, not by the company. Means 50 years energy and >50.000 years problems. Nuclear is the best, but only if we have an working fusion reactor, means, maybe in 10-20 years. Meanwhile the fision energy is sponsored by certain lobbies and the weapon industry, they are the real reason.
In Spain the energy costs for the user are ~14 cts/kWh at some hours even free (the lowest costs in the EU), thanks to the intensive use of renevable energy, blocked often by fossil and nuclear lobbies in other countries.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/russia-s-820-mw-sodium-cooled-reactor-burns-next-gen-actinide-nuclear-fuel-successfully/ar-AA229IGY
I'm surprised by all the angry comments of people on this thread, people don't realize the true potential modern nuclear energy has, to produce a lot of energy and just right besides where that energy is needed, one of the biggest problems of renewables is that you don't get to choose where they are produced, so in most cases it implies transmission lines, very high capacity ones and very long ones, my country recently had a country wide outage caused by the failure of one of those that caused a cascading failure.
I'm not saying that renewables aren't incredible tech, they are, they really do, like they're one of the best sources of energy available, but they aren't perfect, and them being complemented with nuclear would do a big deal of good, as I said before nuclear has it's own unique strengths that can help out a lot.
And also I see a lot of people here talking from outright ignorance about the state of the arts of the tech, it has advanced a lot since the 1950's lol, and repeat the same arguments, forever debunked, people do about nuclear that frustrating, Fukushima and Chernobyl were both plants with stupidly old tech, run by clowns and ignoring really well known risks for the sake of the lulz, even when all nuclear accidents combined, the tech has killed a fraction of people than what hidro has killed, modern tech is heaps more advanced and has included everything needed for that sort of accident to be impossible, even nuclear waste is a solved problem, the only thing stopping it from fully materializing is political will (Altough is kind of a blessing in hiding because now tech to use spent fuel seems to be the future also).
IDK, people do disappoint on their ignorance.
I didn't realize anti nuclear was so widespread. You are all propagandized to such a degree that I'm surprised you aren't defending clean coal.
They're gonna wash it!
TBF, historically most nations allow "temporary" storage of spent nuclear fuel cells in perpetually filled pools or running water, which have the potential to run out and cause a nuclear apocalypse via irradiating everything on the surface of the earth. Currently millions of spent rods are stored "temporarily" in such pools which all together contain as much Cesium-137 as 30 Chernobyls in the USA alone.
It gets talked about a lot in "what if" scenarios about human extinction, because if Humanity died out then those pools will dry up and everything else will die alongside us.
some sources on this?
https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/pools
https://www.pogo.org/reports/spent-nuclear-fuel-pools-in-us-reducing-deadly-risks-of-storage
What's the LCoE of new nuclear? What's the LCoE when you add the cost of the storage mentioned in your meme?
Nuclear has been artificially made way more expensive than it should be.
For one part, why is it the only energy source that has to take care of its waste? (LCOE includes this cost, and I'm not saying they shouldn't, I'm saying other sources should too.) Coal can spew waste out (including radioactive waste) and they don't have to handle it. Wind just throws out blades and doesn't have to deal with them. Etc.
The insane strictness on designs and safety are also far higher than they should be. A lot of its based on a linear no threshold model of radiation safety, which has been disproven., which dramatically increases costs.
Even still, LCOE for nuclear is pretty competitive in the US, and the US is one of the worst places for nuclear, as our dirty energy companies have easily been able to purchase laws to increase the cost of nuclear, so they can't compete as much. Sort this by LCOE and see how many cheap nuclear is for most nations.
I think the average person vastly over estimates how much waste is produced. If I recall the stat was that the entire world's nuclear waste could fit in a football field. That's really tiny.
Now find a football field sized area in a dry geologically stable location that is willing to take the waste.
Australia :)
I don't think anyone has successfully negotiated nuclear waste import to Australia, though Australia does have some highly suitable locations
pro-nuke when you tell them nuclear energy is fossil fuel energy: 😡
*wind and solar are unarguably the best energy sourcrs, and the only sustainable ones.
it isn't tough, fossil fuel implies hydrocarbons, as that's where the fossil part comes from.
Nuclear fuel is non renewable but it is also clean.
CO2 clean. None of the good places to store nuclear waste are willing to take it.
It's clean regarding chemical waste.
I've helped build nuclear waste caskets, nothing is perfect but the amount of attention put into making it safe is incredible! The layers (and quality) of stainless steel welds would put your average steel bridge to shame....
But fission will always be limited (as in non-renewable). If everything was powered by nuclear, I'm sure we'd see even more awefull mining operations. Also, fusion should in theory be much better, if the thermodynamics of it end up working.
Lmfaoooo quality meme
Wow, I am truly surprised by the amount of angry comments this meme generated lol
Am I the only one that read this in the tongue-in-cheek "checkmate, atheists" tone because it looked like an intentional strawman argument?
honestly, IDK how much of a strawman it is, Germany literally replaced nuclear with coal.
People are actually using this argument to keep using fossil fuels? That's crazy.
Nuclear fuel is a kind of fossil fuel
it literally isn't, why people are saying this? the fossil part comes from being, well fossilized organic material, hence hidrocarbon rich, nuclear isn't tthat, it's not renewable but is clean energy.
Look at all this cleanliness:
Its not matter that people die, because they do and will from anything, it is how many
This graphic is incorrect.
How?
Many, many more people have died from coal and nuclear.
If you add up the total number of deaths since nuclear inception in the 50s then ramp up the attributed deaths to the maximum number of possible deaths, the total rounding up, is 102,000. Coal alone exceeds that by estimates millions every year.