What are your thoughts and feelings towards nuclear power?
I am interested in hearing your opinions about nuclear power, what you know, if you have any fears, or ideas? Do you know if your country has any nuclear power generation?
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It's great and we should have more of it.
Unjustified fears of it blowing up and destroying the world are ridiculous and overblown, especially given modern advances in reactor design and safety. Nuclear waste isn't really an issue, so much as it is an issue of bad policy based on fear mongering about waste being stolen and turned into nuclear weapons/dirty bombs. Which has never happened... it's utterly stupid that due to these stupid fears we don't re-process fuel, which would reduce it's volume by 80%.
There are 431 reactors, and 360 of them are based on 1960s technology, designed and built mostly in the 1970s. They are 50+ years old. Thanks to Chernobyl, reactors are basically stuck in time. Esp when you realize that non-nuclear plants only last about 30 years before they are replaced
There are only 4 Gen 3 reactors in service, and 2 gen 4. Why we don't have 200+ gen 3/4 reactors is... insane. We just keep re-fueling the less safe Gen 2 reactors.
But this is generally just a problem with all our infrastructure in the developed world in general... we don't renew or upgrade it... we just keep patching it and then we wonder why everything is so shitty and inefficient... because we refuse to actually upgrade things in a real way
How is the waste not an issue? I have never heard the argument of it being stolen to be honest. Here in germany the problem with the waste is, that there is no good place to put it (though this is partly a political problem)
in the USA they won't re-process fuel because of fears it will be stolen and turned into weapons. so we have 5x the waste volume than other countries where fuel is re-processed.
also we won't use breeder reactors because of this, which are more efficient and produce way less waste than normal reactors.
yes, it's all political problems. people are ignorant and angry and fearful and won't let nuclear power problems be resolved because they don't understand solutions exist and if you try to educate them they refuse to learn because they want to cling to their fears and emotions about it. a lot of political problems are like this. we have active solutions for many social problems, but people refuse to allow them to be implemented because of fear and delusional belief.
Only ~3% of nuclear waste is really dangerous, that's the spent fuel rods. The majority of "nuclear waste" is stuff that was in proximity and contains intermediate to low levels of radioactivity. It's obviously not great to injest or spend all your time around, but it can be safely stored almost anywhere as it's mostly only emitting alpha and beta particles.
So what about the dangerous stuff like fuel rods? Well, if you took all the dangerous waste nuclear power ever created and piled it in one place, it would cover a football field and be stacked 3 meters high. That sounds like a lot, but remember, that's is ALL the dangerous waste nuclear power has EVER produced. Compare that to literally any other form of energy production, including solar and wind, and the footprint from nuclear is laughably, almost unimaginably, small.
I think you have no clue how dangerous that waste is. There is literally no way to store it in a volume like you described because of all the heat it generates. If it gets distributed for some reason, it could contaminate the entire planet.
Also, other nuclear waste is not not dangerous. You have to store it in a way that it doesn't pollute water, for example. That is a much harder problem than you might think. Here is an interesting read for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
I don't think OP was saying we should store it that way, just that it's not as physically as big a problem as people imagine. It's a question of scale.
We could just leave them all in the storage containers that the plants use and put them in one place and the overall facility wouldn't be that big.
As for groundwater contamination, you are right. No leaks allowed. This is a consideration for any waste management really (superfund sites, anyone?). Transportation is another issue for consideration. If you move the waste on a roadway, and there's an accident, you're going to have to clean up the mess (assuming there is any. We have really amazing containers for shipping) or at least check for any issues, which means every fire department with a major roadway needs to both be trained and have the equipment to handle a radioactive car crash.
Because the amount of waste we've created is really quite small. Per the US DoE:
There are ways we can repurpose or reuse spent nuclear fuel. I don't know a lot about this so I won't get into it, but even if we chose to do nothing with it and just bury it, we know enough about geology that we could stick it into some bedrock that will be stable for the next 500 million years.
But long term storage also isn't easy. Maybe it's less of a problem in the US (you've got a lot more free space where no one lives) but it has to be made sure that it does not contaminate the surroundings, even in thousands of years and more. Another (as of yet unsolved) problem is far more human. How do we mark those places, if at all. See this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
Just hollow out a mountain, like the US did with Yucca mountain, plenty of storage (if you're politicians let it be used for its purpose) that is pretty easy to secure for centuries (and after that probably pretty easy as well). Assuming you close it up well when full, even future historians probably will have an idea that it's dangerous by the level of difficulty to just get into it.
Not trying to discount the issue, just point out that there generally are solutions to the issues around nuclear waste, just that politicians have mucked it up quite a bit in the past (especially in the US).
The idea in germany are old mines, we already have some "temporary" solution (an old saltmine) but there are some problems with it. Understandably there is a lot of nimbyism around the permanent storage, which makes finding a good spot a lot harder
Until Harry Reid does everything in his power to shut it down like an asshole
eh, i'm 50% talking out of my ass here, but the waste is actually not a problem. if we wanted to, we could use it again to extract even more energy out of it ... problem is that that's currently not economical.
"using it again" would require special reactor designs that can stimulate the material to do extra-decay. which causes the extra cost.
That is more like 99% out of your ass.
It takes 10 years minimum from design to build out for a nuclear project, so that lines up pretty well with the end of the cold war once the US didn't need more nuclear material.
There is no point in using a technology that is only as profitable as it is due to subsidies and that generates tons of dangerous waste that we have no proper storage strategy for, when we could just use regenerative energy sources with basically no side effects and build a much more resilient power grid in the process.
which, as we all know, implies that it will never happen ...
actually, after reading through your whole comment, it has a few issues:
Yes, you're right, nuclear power plants are safe as long as nobody in engineering royally fucks up. But, as we all know, engineers never fuck up and forget an important detail ... (/s)
This sounds like a popular thing to me ... people think that replacing old things will make them better / more efficient. When that is simply not true. Banks, for example, still use programming language from the 1960s. Why? because actually it turns out that that stuff just works. Meanwhile newer languages each introduce their own new kind of problem. The same phenomenon happens in many cases. I was told that airplanes do the same, using flight control software from 20th century ... for the same reasons. "newer" does not imply better.
In fairness, it's not one engineer. It's literally hundreds of them. Thousands, probably. And not all of them working for a common goal. The power of the NRC is in its desire to slow down and double check (which is why the drump administration's push for deregulation is scary for nuclear).
I'm not saying mistakes don't happen, but the Russians knew Chernobyl was flawed they just didn't care.
I'm a mechanical engineer working on the operations side of a large power plant. I've worked in a few different types of plants but ultimately landed in a big Co-Generation plant. Knowing what I do, the actual arguments against nuclear are pretty flimsy. It's just better in almost every way especially compared to solid fuel. I strongly believe that there is a place for every method of generating we currently use (excluding coal for the most part). Main generating electricity can and should come from nuclear on the most wide scale with hydro, solar and wind being a large chunk where geographically most viable. While nat gas and liquid fuel should mostly be used in peaker plants and large scale essential buildings like hospitals. I hope to work in a nuclear plant eventually and have positioned myself to be qualified to do so.
Awesome, I wish you the best, we need more people to get involved in nuclear power, myself included. Opponents point to older designs and point at the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island and think that can happen at any moment, which they can't. I think we have an obligation to dispel that fear because the designs we build today are better.
5 to 15 years ago, I would have agreed with you. Now, I think we need some small number of breeder reactors to supply us with medical isotopes, etc., but I don't see nuclear as financially viable anymore, whatever the reason. Hydro, solar, wind, and battery can cover our needs at this point, or once we phase out our existing non-renewable and nuclear plants. And every year tips things further in favor of non-nuclear, simply because of the construction times. We also have some very cheap, long-lived battery technologies coming online, which will help with load balancing.
I'd still rather have more nuclear plants than using prime cropland for ethanol fuel production.
The nuclear everyone is afraid of was from an era where priorities 1-9 were making plutonium for nukes or justifying massive uranium centrifuge farms for making weapons grade material.
Priority #10 was making safe electricity. It honestly was more of a waste product from making nukes instead of the point of the plant... It's not a coincidence that nuclear build out matches the cold war era perfectly. Once the cold war ended the US and allies didn't need more nukes to make weapons with... The priority became stabilizing the Petro dollar, which nuclear helps undermine by decoupling nations from being dependant on USD and US treasuries.
Fast reactors and LFTRs are god awful for nuclear weapons (why they weren't made beyond pilot plants or a few examples that exist purely to complicate my point) but are some of the safest designs for new gen IV reactors.
Fast reactors literally burn nuclear waste from Gen 2 plants...
Liquid core reactors can be built in two halves—the heat retaining high reactivity core, and the heat dissipating passively safe container you drain into in an emergency through a freeze plug. That plug works as long as gravity doesn't go away.
Fast reactor waste is safe in 300-500 years, and they can actually be designed to run on existing nuclear waste as fuel. Even the stuff we can't burn currently that has half lives in the hundreds of thousands of millions of years.
Thorium breeder reactors are the future for long term base load stability I think. Its not the only solution to our energy needs though but it's a very attractive option.
I agree to this.
And I will add a strategic note. Power on demand is very important as an asset. You can in fact blot out the sun, a volcano eruption of significant magnitude would do that naturally and no amount of storage would be enough. Wind isn't always available. Strategically and experimentally we need to be able to go "okay now 10x it!" .
It's too bad we don't have great ways to get power from waves yet. I am all for spreading out our dependence over multiple sources, but to not have the means when they fail is to rely on diplomacy and even more infrastructure.
I'm curious how far along Rolls Royce is, are any of those smr's running yet?
Yeah I agree. It is a shame about wave energy too but I think we'll eventually figure it out. The downside is to get meaningful energy without beating the crap out of your equipment (using giant waves) you end up needing to cover huge areas with wave generators.
Ironically hydro power and nuclear are natural partners when combined with other renewables.
Nuclear covers the base load generation, and hydro trims up the remaining power production to perfectly meet demand and condition power on the grid. When renewables begin over producing the dam can ramp down to its minimum flow to meet its water license, allowing the reservoir to fill.
I think it's going to be a constellation of solutions to replace our current energy sources. One of the most important I've been watching is soapstone thermal batteries. You can massively over build solar and wind if you know there's a bunch of soapstone thermal batteries to act as demand for it.
During overproduction you turn resistive heaters inside those soapstone batteries on progressively until the grid stabilizes. Germany actually had (has? I'm not sure if they still do it) something like this for water heaters using frequency sensitive relays to help stabilize grid production. If the grid frequency started to climb relay after relay would activate adding more and more heating load to soak up demand to stabilize the grid.
If we did the same for industrial users who currently burn natural gas, or even a thermal battery to provide district heating for towns and cities using cheap overproduced renewables, you can replace a huge amount of natural gas for nuclear, hydro, and renewable peak shaving.
Thanks for your addition and insights
It's such an interesting field, infrastructure and power management. One of the best things I look forward too in life is to see how far we can get as a species before I kick the bucket. And I don't have to to anything, it keeps evolving. I hope we never see war.
Have a good weekend
I think wind/solar first priority. Nuclear wherever it makes sense. I may trust Canadians to run them properly and in places not prone to natural disasters like Earthquakes and Tsunamis, but we live on a planet full of assholes. Downside is potential invaders bombing nuclear power plants in the future.
It would have to be a pretty big bomb. After 9/11 they did a bunch of research and it turns out a reactor building can take a hit from a 747.
Renewables are absolutely the future, but people really don't get how the nuclear industry handles safety. If we could regulate every industry as well as the nuclear industry has been since 1980 (which the current administration is trying to strip away, of course) we would eliminate a heckuva lotta risk in our society.
I'm nuclear industry adjacent, and I work in public safety. My thoughts, which are only my own:
The eroded safety culture is a big worry of mine. COVID did some wiiild shit to the healthcare industry.
This is absolutely my main concern too (and the specific area in which I work, so the thing I feel lost comfortable commenting on). I don't think it's going to be an overnight shift or anything. What I think will happen is that the US will step away from standard international practices when it comes to how much radiation a person can receive (and therefore how much the general public can receive) and while nothing will change right away, eventually nuclear plants will cut costs somewhere and not filter out as much material as they have been required to up til now. Any increases in cancer 20-30 years from now will probably get blamed on something else though, knowing how our system works. For nuclear workers, the effects will probably be more noticable and quicker, but again, attempts will be made to hide any negative health consequences. Lord forbid we have a release incident during that time though. And even worse if regulations relax to the point where the utility doesn't have to carry the burden of fixing the problem they created (which is where I see things going over the long term). Right now, if a plant releases radioactive material they are legal responsible for that material. If that eroded what incentive will they have to make sure they don't lose it?
I'm struggling to believe your nuclear industry adjacent if you think that the energy density of any type of battery system known to man starts to compare to the energy density of thorium let alone u-232
It's not about energy density. It's about base load issues. One of the big items that the nuclear industry harps on is that they handle base load energy requirements when wind and solar aren't producing as much. But a good battery system would also solve that problem, by allowing excess wind and solar energy to be stored for use when the base load is high but wind and solar aren't able to produce that amount of energy at that exact time.
It literally is about energy density. You don't understand how many batteries you would need to replace one mid sized nuclear plant. Batteries are not 100% efficient closer to 70% after charge and discharge. A mid sized plant is 500-700MW. A 1 MW battery is a 20-foot shipping container. It weighs about 15 tons and you would need about 1000 to replace the plant and enough renewables to recharge all of those 1000 batteries to get the 700MW back out to note, this would be 1,360,000 cubed feet of batteries, not counting housing, cooling systems, sprinkler systems, or anything else. This doesn't even get into the fact the battery bank isn't producing live load and is only good for 1 to 3 hours of draw till the cells are drained (1 to 3MWH ). While the plant produces round the clock energy. So quadroople your batteries minimum.
I guess the point is that they're working on better batteries, right? Ones that can get better efficiencies and all that? I am not an expert in this area of course, but I'm also not able to build you an SMR, so again, idk what technology will eventually win out (in terms of cost effectiveness or overall viability) I just know it's something everyone's talking about.
Are you the current president of the United States? Because I've just explained to you the exact flaw with this system in detail. And you have glossed over this with a platitude that everybody's talking about it while providing no insight or understanding of the problem at hand, while also admitting you do not understand the fundamentals.
Lots of people talk about world peace. Turns out world peace is hard.
As an industry adjacent person, I'm curious to know your thoughts on the potential for nuclear fuel reprocessing. Is it at all feasible to start up again or is it a pipe dream?
This isn't my exact area, but my understanding is that this is also a political will thing. There are concerns about reprocessing because some of the reprocessing could make bombs and we're scared of it getting stolen? I think? Idk, not my area. But as I understand it, other places in the world already do reprocessing. I'm not sure we will ever get there. We can't even get a storage facility!
I live in Taiwan and we are actively shutting down our nuclear facilities. Now the majority of our electricity is from fossil fuels.
I much rather work towards clean energy but at the same time only use nuclear power.
Safety issues aside, I don’t like the power grid topology they create—where power is distributed radially from a single centralized source. Systems like that are fragile and inflexible, with a single point of failure; and they promote similar institutions to control them.
Networks are more robust when they’re distributed and redundant, with lots of interconnected local sources. Solar and wind are a lot more amenable to that kind of structure.
This is a good point. While I still think it would be smart to invest more in nuclear, the future is solar and that's a good thing.
I am extremely pro. Hear me out. For instance in Scandinavia, we have some of the largest uranium deposits in the world. Yet we import most of our fissile material from Australia. By boat.
The Scandes (mountain range) happens to be one of the best places to store spent fissile material on the planet.
We also have a highly educated workforce, and some of the best universities and colleges in the world.
We also have regional depopulation in the areas where this would be relevant, and suffer from brain drain, because there is more money to be made abroad for the whole range of academic disciplines, so the smartest people, and a fair chunk of the lesser smart people, move abroad. Because lack of opportunities and money.
Furthermore we are addicted to not only fossil fuels like carbon and gas, we (Europe) import most of our energy from Russia (famously). And we are making a lot of geopolitical concessions for the privilege (Nordstream springs to mind).
My proposition is that we expand nuclear power in the nordics, massively. We mine our own uranium deposits, store the spent fuel in our own mountains (think Moria, Nords would make for great LOTR dwarves), create a massive surplus of energy, then sell it off to the rest of Europe, creating basically an energy export hegemony. The energy basket of Europe.
We'd be fucking kings.
Then we'd create a Nordic Union, and get nukes, but that's a different story.
(Just as a fun fact, Sweden had one of the worlds most advanced nuke programs after WW2. They got talked out of it bc USA)
Reprocessing spent fuel is also a massive opportunity. But yea I am 100% in agreement with you.
Right? Let's build world class long term storage, it's like a parking garage, a scam old as time, just rent out space to whoever can't or don't wanna deal with their shit and cash that check monthly. And we can enrich and be lords, of course there are some political obstacles to say the least but what are we if we don't dare to dream
Maybe I'm thinking about the whole thing in a SimCity 2000 kind of way but that's just how I was brought up.
I would gladly live next door to a nuclear plant
It's safer than living next to a coal fired power plant!
Most countries would rely on other countries for the fuel, like european plants rely on russia. Being sovereign for your power generation is very important in my opinion.
That's a good point. Here's a list of countries with the largest uranium reserves:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_reserves
What about thorium tho
Thorium is a byproduct of rare earth element processing, and also exists on its own in ore deposits. My home country of Canada has insane amounts of it in the ground.
Thorium is actually insanely abundant, if we built reactors that used it, thorium would never be the bottleneck. We would need plutonium/uraium though I think the jump start the reaction.
Yea but thats such a litle amound of uranium in compairesen. We will prob find a other way of jumpstarting the reaction if there was more budget in thorium reactors
They're welcome to buy from my home country of Canada. We aren't going to extort people over it, or close the strait of uranium for 6 months and cause a global energy catastrophe.
I think we are making big mistakes ditching it.
Renewables have two problems that need to be complemented by other type of energy source.
1.- they take a lot of land. As energy demand increases the amount of land taken is going to reach a limit. Then what?
2.- Most renewables have low momentum. Mostly only hydro have great momentum. This is critical for net safety. My country recently falled into a total blackout among other things because our energy composition (high on renewables) had low momentum and couldn't handle some inestabilities.
For a complementary energy source we have 2 options, burning coal/gas or nuclear. Out of two options I prefer nuclear Sadly every country that ditched nuclear because "renewables are the future" ended upping up their gas/coal consumption for energy production. Most famous example being Germany.
I do think a mix of renewables and nuclear is the future we need to achieve.
Sadly most western societies only look on the short term. And a good national nuclear plant is a long term investment, most governments won't look so far after the next election, so here we are.
I'm glad someone brought up the land use issue. A nuclear power plant is a pretty compact thing, for the amount of power it's creating.
Where nuclear plants have been built to a safe standard, sweat them for their useful life. The costs are paid down, and the energy is cheap to produce, creating only a truckload or so of waste (which can be reprocessed into fuel) for a year’s power.
Where there aren’t usable nuclear plants, you’re probably better off building renewables and/or energy storage. The upfront costs of nuclear are steep. (Also, some nuclear plants built when the climate was cooler are having to shut down on hot days due to the temperature of water used to cool them being too high.)
In either case, I’d rather have modern nuclear power than coal.
I don’t think the technicals even matter.
What matters now is:
Popular public perception.
Incentives for decision makers.
And lobbying funds to sway both.
And this makes it tricky:
Fission looks bad to a layman. It’s scary, and failures and the waste feel dangerous no matter what the reality is. It’s a perfect fit for social media clickbait too.
New fission plants are a long term investment. They’re expensive, up front. In other words, they don’t yield any political points before a governor’s or mayor’s or or CEO’s term ends, basically, while even renewables like solar or wind are faster to set up.
There is a sizable nuclear lobby. This is a plus. But Oil will crush it like a bug if it gets “too big” and appreciably threatens petro power.
So as much as I love it, I thinks the best we can hope for in most regions is “recommissioning old plants.”
And to be clear, fusion is a completely different category to me.
I think it’s a waste of precious funds, and is “hopium” for the public. It’s theoretically interesting, but even with a breakthrough, in best-case scenarios, it’s still gonna be expensive to maintain and have many drawbacks. Some are even worse than fission (like more extreme neutron radiation irradiating and eroding components, and stupendously high up-front costs).
I think the funds would be better allocated towards maser drilling for geothermal and cheaper solar cells. And these would yield quicker political points, too, like coal/gas plants quickly converted to geothermal, or mass produced, cheap “backyard solar” the average person can buy and make money with.
Solar cells are getting cheaper anyway, there's no stopping that. And the oncoming oil shortages are going to make the oil lobby look like a joke.
The oil lobby is not a joke. Underestimating them has been one of environmentalists’ biggest mistakes, ever.
…And the oil shortage will make them fabulously rich.
Doubt
And yet here we are, with the far right absolutely exploding in Europe as people clamor for more drilling, and climate change and renewables branded “woke” in the US, and much of the world increasing emissions still.
Guess who the groups stoking this are getting funding from?
As another example, my (scientifically minded) Dad showed me a WSJ article, just the other day, on how geoengineering makes any “risk” of climate change a non issue. The whole argument was that the economically optimal path forward was doubling down on petro.
Also, solar cells are cheap, but if we put fusion’s funding into them and geothermal, I think they’d be dramatically cheaper and more available by now.
Technology really doesn't work like that, putting more money into something doesn't make something available sooner. The hope of fusion should not delay solutions now. Solar is good and growing rapidly.
I like the idea of nuclear power, but I think the cost is not justified as it is currently implemented.
Now, the cost for nuclear power can come down. The Trump admin already reduced the cost for setting up nuclear power plants in the US, but that cost reduction comes with increased risk. The reason why I would be fine living near a nuclear power plant, is because the whole thing is designed and run with safety as the first priority. If you haven't yet, check out the Smarter Everyday video Destin filmed inside a nuclear power plant. You can tell from watching the video that safety at that plant is a constantly improving process, and it comes at a cost. Extra concrete to protect the building, extra environmental studies to look for contamination, round the clock armed security... All these things make nuclear power safer, and they are all things that every investor and board member would love to cut to make some extra margin on their billion dollar power project. TBF, I don't think the profit/rent seeking line-go-up management and political culture in the US today is condusive to running safe and reliable nuclear power, and I would much rather see our power come from lower-consequence renewables.
That's exactly my fear, that some money-obsessed person may decide safety costs too much.
There's a great story from the Fukushima response that is basically this exact thing. Plant operator (I think it was...) got told by some bigwig not to put seawater in the ractor because it would scuttle the reactor and it could never be used again. Guy ordered it done anyway because they didn't have fresh water and the reactor needed water over it to prevent total meltdown.
You hit the nail on the head, my friend. I'm always telling the people I work with that part of our job is to verify what the utility says they are doing. Not because we don't trust the people we work with, but because we can't trust their bosses.
Also, I'm going to check out the video you mentioned, but as someone who has been in several plants... Yes, they really care about safety. To an almost annoying degree. Like, even in the hallways you're not supposed to walk and look at your phone screen because it's a safety hazard. Which, sure, but it's an office and I have emails to read, you know?
They aren't nearly as unsafe as people think they are and I think they are completely fine.
BUT it still doesn't make sense to build them, because renewables (especially solar) is so much cheaper, so we should focus all our energy on expanding that instead of nuclear.
Nuclear is good for many reasons except it’s not good for anyone when there still is geopolitical and military instability. I don’t know much other than what can be read on Wikipedia and other popular information sources.
I assume you are talking about fission. We (Germany) somewhat famously don't have nuclear power anymore and I think that is a good thing. IMO the risks overweigh the benefits, and I don't only mean the risk of a nuclear power plant blowing up. Aside from that there are two mayor downsides.
First they are fucking expensive to build at least any recent projects I have heard of are billions over cost.
Second is the waste problem which specifically is a hot topic in germany, there just doesn't seem to be a good way to get rid of it. I have read some comments saying that there are ways to deplete them even more but never heard of such a system being actually used.
A minor point for me is also that I think, that less centralised infrastructure using wind and solar energy is a better way to go.
Some proponents (especially online) love to talk about "small" reactors, but I've never heard of one actually being in use, at most there were tests of it is actually feasible (as far as I know at least, and I am not an expert)
Yea it was so clever of you guys to ditch nuclear in favor of... gas and coal? Great job protecting the environment there. Definitely not a dumbass decision made due to fear mongering.
No we didn't. At least in all charts I could find (here for example) the usage of coal and gas did not change in the worst case and went down in the last few years because renewables increased
This graph is so painful to look at, if Germany kept a baseline of nuclear, you could have completely phase out coal entirely by now.
Or if the conservatives didn't kill our solar industry in the eraly 2010s we could have had a lot more renewables
How does Germany handle the green house gas waste produced by coal power plants?
Badly and those aren't even the only problem with coal power just skim through this article about the Hambscher Forst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_Forest I am not saying that nuclear is the worst way to generate power, but if germany would have wanted to continue using it, the time would have been 20-30 years ago. The last exosting plants, which were shut down a few years ago, weren't up to the task anymore, especially when looming at the problem france's reactors have with the heat every year
See that big space up there with the clouds? Let's just put it there.
I wonder how many of those that died in France during this heat wave think about that idea.
I recently watched this video and learned so much!
Yes, my country has at least three nuclear power plants.
It would have been great if there was not the questions of;
For all this I think it's a waste of resources to invest on an old technology thats sounds cool but has been proven to have many major drawbacks, compared to what it has to offer. So I'm all for using these resources in renewable energy sources, how to be more efficient with them, how to improve the accumulation capacities and how to have grids that are cimpatible with them.
It's expensive and unnecessary and doesn't work when it's hot out.
Germany literally had to help France and its nuclear power stations out with its renewables because they couldn't cool down the nuclear power stations during the heatwave.
Yes it is important to have all the options. All the other days of the year nuclear provided energy to us, the neighbours of France. To have all the cards means to play every turn
I think it's good to have, I don't think we should push it above renewables though, I think it should be in addition to renewables, to fill in the gaps. Batteries and pumped hydro would be better but they have drawbacks of course.
I doubt it's going to happen here in Australia though. There is way too much public pushback. Our right wing party went into the last election trying to push nuclear as the solution to climate change and that election was a disaster for them.
Still about 70% coal and gas, big oof. Nuclear would help a lot, especially because Australia has one of the largest uranium reserves.
I used to think it was the way to go for base load generation, but now I'm more excited about sodium batteries because they seem safer and cheaper.
It should be managed by international committee and installed/managed anywhere that can afford it and have a proven history of low turmoil.
Giving people access to cheap, clean energy fixes a lot of problems.
just don't give it to Ghandi and everything should be fine
Powerful, but also nonsensical in a world where nuclear reactors have to be stopped because the water used to cool them isn't cold enough. Several reactors in France are powered down or nerfed during heatwaves, for instance. Also, when nuclear goes wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong, with consequences for generations. It doesn't sound reasonable.
I personally feel safer with wind, solar, water, etc, but pragmatism will probably ask of us to use a mix of both renewable and nuclear, especially if AI data-centers hog enough power for us all to live in the tech-surveillance world desired by our genocidal, children-r*ping Epstein classes.
Hm. I guess some technazis ought to get luigied. For ecological reasons, of course, nothing personal. We could also upcycle them to compost.
From the US:
Nuclear power represents the intermediate stage between hydrocarbon/petrochemical/fossil fuels and fully renewable (solar/wind/geothermal) energy; an eventual full transition to nuclear power, even as a de facto stopgap until renewable energy infrastructure can handle the power demands of today, is ultimately the correct course of action, especially if the intention is to reduce and ultimately eliminate CO2 & other greenhouse gas emissions to slow global warming & climate change.
I’d rather solar at this point.
It's good and has few downsides, but I feel like we kind of missed the boat and solar is the move now.
There is still massive energy demand, "missed the boat" is kind of nonsensical.
It's not a well-reasoned feeling, I'm sure if I saw the numbers on the energy production vs cost etc., I could form a better opinion on it. As-is I will support both nuclear and solar, since they're both clearly better than fossil fuels.
My only complaint to add to the debate is that too much of the waste discussion assumed it's burnt fuel and not just irradiated junk shoved in barrels. At least that is what a former nuclear engineer complained to me about.
The second I guess in the US is the weird public private deals that permiate the industry. Like who's the inspector? Oh that's a private company? Whos responsible for the waste? The government? Where is it stored? Oh your not sure? It was SUPPOSED to here but some of its there and some of it supposed to recycled but some supposedly can't be. Who funded this? Who's profiting?
I got some very confusing answers asking people in the industry about it, and they seemed to agree it was confusing.
It is confusing! I'll add my understanding and it will probably be different than other things you've heard, but I'll add it anyway.
The NRC (for the US) is the regulator. They have ultimate authority to inspect all nuclear power plants. Sometimes the state does as well, depends on the state's agreement with the NRC. But ultimately it's the NRC. Every power plant has an NRC inspector whose job it is to look for infractions and make sure the plant is doing all the things. They obviously can't be everywhere at once, so there's a bunch of other stuff the plants have to do to prove they are following all the rules. There is currently a huge regulatory burden on nuclear power plant operators and owners. Good. It should be that way for small modular reactors but it remains to be seen of they'll be able to get away with less safe practices (my bet is yes, at least under the current administration).
Waste is complicated. The US government made a deal a long time ago with the utilities building the plants that they'd provide a place for waste storage, and they haven't, so they've been sued. They'll just keep getting sued and have to pay the utilities back (the utilities pay for the waste location by paying the gov... It's weird). There are some attempts being made to have a private company (or companies) take over storing the waste. It's complicated, and still requires us to transport the waste, which is also complicated. That being said, the DOE has been doing transuranic waste transportation for ages (irradiated junk in barrels) It's called WIPP and they move all the contaminated crap to a salt mine in NV. It's not easy, but it can be done.
As for loosing any of the waste... Yeah, if you lose the actual waste that's very bad and NRC very mad at you. But the irradiated junk? Eh, the government loses shit all the time. Irradiated junk isn't great, but it's probably not killing you. Probably not.
And as for who's profiting? Who knows? It's like George Carlin said. It's a big club and you ain't in it.
It's better, smaller, and even more eco-friendly than what is generally considered "green".
But it takes a very long time to get up and running, and the current world is all about the short term.
One downside I see is that bad cunts can bomb them. Like Israel bombing the Russia-operated one in Iran.
I am defintely not against nuclear power and I am also not afraid of any nuclear disasters seeing how safe nuclear reactors actually are. I still prefer solar and wind power over nuclear tho because we still deal with nuclear waste and not very well imo. I would also love having fusion reactors or helium-3 fission reactors which also combats the nuclear waste problem.
To be fair, there's waste issues with end of life for solar and wind too. No matter what solution we go with, we need a way to deal with the waste (recycling is probably the best option, but storage for nuclear waste doesn't actually take up that much space. For solar/wind, it's going to have to be recycling or a huge ass landfill).
I'm skeptical, but not against it. It's not an existential threat to humanity as the general populous believes, but it's also not a silver bullet. Assuming we as a society wish to create more electricity (which is a pretty massive assumption, but a story for another time), nuclear power is the most appealing and effective option. Kyle Hill on YouTube has explained this in great depth. However, the wast disposal is still mildly problematic and always will be. What's more, the mining is certainly not a solved problem, and brings with it a reasonably high risk of contamination.
Perhaps if I knew a government agency trustworthier than the DOE (or US government as a whole) was involved, I would feel differently. However, I have seen how they have operated currently and historically first hand, and I don't find their methods satisfactory.
Personally, I think the better method is reduction of energy consumption. When I worked for the DOE, I was told that utilities were bleeding money, and ready to go bankrupt because household appliances had reduced demand that much. So they lobbied for electric vehicles, which has strained the grid in some ways, but that's a complicated story for another time. But as many of you already know, an EV is a highly ineffective means of reducing carbon emissions in the long-term. While more effective than gas, public transit, bicycles, and changes to infrastructure as the more effective means of reducing carbon emissions long-term.
I like it and want to see it spread. I think if you tally up all the deaths indirectly caused by air pollution from fossil fuels they'll exceed the people killed in nuclear accidents by orders of magnitude.
By a very very large magnitude. And when you factor in stuff like mining deaths and industrial accidents, nuclear kills less people than wind (per kwh) but solar is slightly better than nuclear.
Nuclear power is probably good, but my country has decided that we're not using it (Austria)
Every country that's able should have some nuclear power if for no other reason than creating radioisotopes used for medicine.
It would have been a good transition source of power away from fossil fuels 15 years ago with further development while we build out a renewable infrastructure. Now, best I can see it as backup for some areas of the country.
I think thorium reactors are really strong and safe to use mixed in with solar water and wind only using thorium would be kinda dumb tho
We have some aging reactors from the 1980s.
Generally favourable views. It was a mistake to stop building them.
If you find the cooling water you can build one in my back yard if you like if the town I live in gets a few cents per kWh you produce.
The cool thing about wind and solar power generation is that you could build one in your backyard.
For nuclear power that is seriously frowned upon.
Give it time. Maybe one day we'll be able to buy a kit. (For internet purposes, this is a j o k e)
It takes billions and almost a decade to spin up a reactor. Current reactors are a generational risk. One bomb at Diablo Canyon and an area the size of New Jersey becomes uninhabitable for 1000 years.
Had Fukushima gone slightly differently you would have lost Tokyo and the 125 mile stretch of the island nation would be uninhabitable for a generation.
Lessons from a near miss
That’s not even considering the spent fuel concerns…
Meanwhile you could build plenty of solar and wind gen with none of the risk.
Risky, better than fossil fuels in many ways, awesome scientific and industrial achievement
It won’t save us from climate collapse.
nuclear power is fine but extremely dangerous in the hands of the wrong person, not because nuclear power plants itself are dangerous but because we're 1 step away from someone making 1 bad joke about how we should use it in "other ways" and that would escalate international conflicts rapidly. and i do not trust the government to be stable enough to not eventually fall into the wrong hands. therefore, no. at least not in the foreseeable future.
It's the least bad option for generating the base load. Although properly managed wind or hydro can deliver some, it's usually not enough.
That being said, I do think some of the fears are justified. It's about tradeoffs: do you want a low level of constant pollution (coal), or a catastrophic disaster once every 100 years (nuclear). Then there is also the waste, which is "solved" only if you permanently sacrifice some area, and hope geological movements or underground water don't touch it. So it's should definitely be an important part of the mix, but the risks shouldn't be dismissed.
France can serve as a positive example. Imo they are doing energy policy right.
If you look the death rate from nuclear per energy generated, it's suuuper low, like lower than most renewables. Also most nuclear disasters come from very old reactor technology, and bad decisions / mismanagement.
Yeah, I'm not very confident that we managed to eliminate mismanagement. It's a constant threat in any organization. Luckily most companies don't deal with nuclear materials.
Fair enough, but we we can learn from the past and limit the harm that mismanagement can even do. For example, Chernobyl had so many preventable things go wrong, and even then it all had to happen at once. So much of that has been addressed on a structural level and with better training and procedures, not to mention that there are modern reactor designs that fail safe and won't meltdown at all.
We'll never eliminate the human factor, but nuclear power plants now all come with big concrete buildings around them just in case.
pros:
cons:
All in all, it is a great excuse to have the expensive infrastructure for nukes and submarines (see France).
* the stories i know only from the rather thorough & proper countries Switzerland, Germany, France... it's crazy.
Nuclear energy is expensive to generate compared to its green competitors. Therefore, it's a waste of time and money to focus on it at a time when renewable energy is currently cheaper to produce, knowing that the gap between nuclear and energy is projected to widen even more.
I think that's a somewhat narrow view on how energy works.
How so? Shouldn't our societies aim to produce the most cost-beneficial energy? Also, my opinion is based on a range of economic indicators, including Australia's CSIRO's calculations for nuclear energy prices in kWh vs other renewable prices per kWh. I am of course excluding fossil fuels (obviously nuclear energy beats that with respect to GHGs, but drops the ball when matched against scalable renewables like solar and wind).
Cost effectiveness isn't the only consideration. My area isn't how they move the power around but I know that plays a role too.
It's fair to point out that distribution has its own dilemmas, as does storing excess energy. But those are secondary in my view. As far as public policy goes, given that nuclear energy are big public expenditure endeavors, in my view the economics need to make sense to the public to justify nuclear power generation.
Another factor is, of course, time. Is it worth investing in nuclear if the objective is to cut GHGs by X year, when we know a nuclear plant would take Y years to come online?
One big unknown is the total amount of electricity consumed. If the assumption is a relative decline or stable amount of global demand in the future, then nuclear makes limited sense, whereas a spike in demand, possibly caused by unmitigated AI energy demand, could warrant recalculating the cost-effectiveness of nuclear energy.
It was worth it 30-50 years ago. But we wasted too much time fucking around.
At this point any money spent is better spent on wind and solar.
I've seen this mentality too many times. The fact is China is actively building many nuclear power plants. The idea that it's "too late" is ridiculous. There is growing demand for nuclear power. You can have solar, wind, AND nuclear.
With unlimited resources, yes it would make sense to keep building nuclear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
But wind and solar have outpaced nuclear. You can get way more power way quicker with wind and solar than you can nuclear.
And what we need right now is maximum speed. We don't have time. This transition should be happening overnight, but we're dragging our feet.
In reality it makes sense to keep building nuclear, the resources required to build nuclear are mostly different than building solar and wind, so you can definitely do both to increase carbon free energy rapidly. I agree we need to rapidly scale solar and wind, but we also need to be advancing nuclear power technology.
Also solar and wind need batteries because of their variable generation, again which are different materials/knowledge than nuclear mostly.
They may take different materials, but until we escape capitalism the only thing that will matter is the literal monetary cost.
In a perfect world, we would be doing both side by side because of the different materials needed. But in the current world the opportunity cost exists due to monetary limits.
Like you keep saying "we". China is currently doing what you mention "in a perfect world". Why can't we do the same? Why is it that Illinois stopped at around exactly 50%? They ACTIVELY constructing these.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
We as in humanity. The majority of nations are capitalist nations, and all nations use currency, which means opportunity cost.
Every state and power utility that is considering what to allocate their money on is going to choose the bare minimum it takes to keep the lights on. That means going the cheapest, not doing the most.
China may have a lower opportunity cost due to the tighter control over the economy, but they're still paying it. China is not in the perfect world situation either. They're just sacrificing the opportunity cost.
I'm confused, do the Chinese not count as a part of humanity? The entire world is losing to China when it comes to nuclear power increases.
Part of the cost of nuclear is all the lawsuits. Someone else talked about China doing a lot with nuclear and part of that is that they don't have to deal with the lawsuits. So so so many lawsuits.
I do love this chart though. It's really representative of why we need to invest in new technology even when it seems stupid expensive at first.
The 2 points I do want to bring up are, one, as someone else mentioned, battery storage. It's sort of the unsolved puzzle of renewables at this point. I'm certain we will figure it out and be able to produce something at scale and renewables at that point will be the only even sort of ethical option (assuming the batteries aren't made of minerals mined exclusively by slave labor or something, then I guess the debate will still rage on).
And second, SMRs are still not actually a thing yet. The cost of nuclear could drop (probably will drop drastically) when mini nuclear power plants are being produced rapidly and shipped around to various locations. Kinda like how building a modular home is much cheaper than a fully custom one with a bespoke design. Assuming they find a way to make all that happen before widespread large load batteries, I wouldn't consider it as clear cut.
Don't want it, don't need it. The nuclear furnace in space provides free fuel. What we need is massive storage. That's the next real battle.
People will argue that we don't have the tech yet. Well, we never have the tech until someone develops it. Do you suppose a chicken laid a nuclear plant? No, it was developed over time. So will energy storage.
Most things have already been said, but here my personal list:
Most importantly: they don't make financial sense. Renewables provide the cheapest energy and even the required energy storages can compete on the market. The French Court of Auditors published a statement after one of the more recent power plants were openened that basically just: stop building fucking nuclear power plants they cost way to much
I don't know anything about the ones in France, but it's worth noting that the second biggest nuclear power plant in the US is in Phoenix. They work in the heat, you just have to be prepared for that.
Idk who thought it was a good idea to put a nuclear power plant, which needs water both for cooling and for steam generation, in the middle of a desert, but there totally is one. It uses wastewater from Phoenix for both and has to remove radionuclides twice (going in, it's from people's pee!)