U.S. Pledge To Triple Global Nuclear Energy By 2050
When I first read the titile, I thought that the US is going to have to build A LOT to triple global production. Then it occured to me that the author means the US is pledging to make deals and agreements which enable other countries to build their own. Sometimes I think the US thinks too much of itself and that's also very much part of American branding.
Where are my renewable bros at? Tell me this is bad.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/us-nuclear-energy-2050-global-pledge-cop28_n_65568048e4b0e4767013797cOpen linkView original on lemmy.ml338
Comments118
I’m a renewable bro. I wanna see as much money pumped into as much infrastructure for renewables as possible. I wanna see solar on every building. I wanna see off-shore wind and tidal energy production. I’m keenly following development of clean, efficient, and cost-effective energy storage technologies, and much is being done in this space to support a future switch to full renewable reliance.
That won’t change the fact that we need on-demand energy now and we need to stop using coal and gas as soon as possible. We currently don’t have energy storage at scale. We will, but we don’t. So in the meantime, nuclear is probably the best option to pursue for use over the next couple of decades while we continue to invest in, and implement, renewables.
I will have to strongly disagree here. The timelines are actually the main reason why I would disqualify Nuclear power as a solution to energy, even as a temporary one.
The time from inception to going online for a new Nuclear reactor is in the range of 15-25 years. Of course we could attempt to shorten that, but that would probably mean compromising on safety. So indeed, if we want to stop using fossil fuels asap, building solar, wind, and hydro, which come online in a matter of months (maybe years for hydro), is much faster.
Aggravating this are two further issues: Current Nuclear energy production is non-renewable, and supply problems are already known to occur at current energy production levels. Second, the global construction capacity is limited, probably to around current levels. Even if we do not push for faster construction times, the number of companies and indeed people who have the necessary expertise are already at full capacity, and again, expanding that would probably imply safety problems.
That is to say, currently running Nuclear power plants are save and clean, so by all means keep doing it until renewables take over. But expanding Nuclear power to solve the energy problem is a non-starter for me, due to the timeline and it being non-renewable. And that is before we start talking about the very real dangers of Nuclear power, which are not operational of course, but due to proliferation, war, and governmental or general societal instability (due to say, climate change).
That is a very interesting report, thanks!
Reading through the summary and overview, they address exactly the problem that I've highlighted: how can we build more reactors faster and more economically, without compromising safety? Of course that means that this issue remains unresolved for now, underscoring my point.
They avoid discussing the other risks I've mentioned (stability, war, proliferation) and admit as much, which is fair enough, but I cannot find any comment regarding the availability of fissile material in the supply chain, which I would think is a rather crucial point.
What I take away from this report is that Nuclear power has a place in solving the climate crisis, if we:
All in all, they conclude that sweeping changes are needed (which is always a risk) and disregard crucial present and known risks. Both these points are simply non-issues with solar, wind, and hydro-power.
I think it's less that it would mean compromising on safety and more that it would mean compromising on the appearance of safety because we'd have to stop letting the courts delay construction while they indulge everybody who tries to sue to stop it with meritless claims.
Also -- and I say this as a Georgia Power ratepayer on the hook for the vast cost overruns for Plant Vogtle 3 and 4 -- we would need to import foreign labor or something because here in the US we are demonstrably too incompetent and corrupt to do it properly ourselves.
Exactly. I'm 100% on board with both renewables and nuclear, but the time to build nuclear would seem to have passed. We're a few decades too late.
That's not too say we shouldn't be building any new nuclear plants - in particular modern designs like SMRs, but I think it would be wiser to focus our energy now on large, grid-scale storage to help smooth out intermittent generation from renewables.
If "we" meaning society could "focus our energy" on anything except profit generation, we could build hundreds of nuclear reactors in less then a decade. We could also eliminate cars and domestic flights, and all kinds of other utopian shit. While you want to live in the status quo but with magic batteries. I'd rather "focus our energy" and live in the Star Trek post-scarcity universe.
It doesn't take 25 years to get a nuclear plant off the ground because people are too busy sitting around counting their capitalism dollars to finish the construction. There are a tremendous number of things that need to happen in addition to planning, approving, building, and commissioning a nuclear facility. I'm fact, is those economic forces that make it happen as fast as possible, because investors want to see a return on their investment. Nuclear plants - and large power plants in general - are not a back deck. They are enormously complex, and given the sensitive nature of their fuel, there are additional things that need to happen on top of what you would expect from, say, a coal or oil generator.
But I'm not sure what you are saying about "magic batteries". How, exactly, do you plan to make intermittent renewable generation viable without some sort of grid-scale storage?
You don't just click your heels together there times and find yourself in a star trek utopia. That's not how things work.
Batteries exist yes. But batteries at the scale required to store the amount of energy that even a small country uses in one day do not exist, and would be by all accounts magic.
Nuclear reactors are not magic, they are real, and they can be built, and should be built both to increase our energy production and replace fossil fuels and of course supplement renewables. Because if nuclear reactors are not built, that supplemental energy won't come from magic storage, it will come from fossil fuels.
When did I say anything about batteries?
That is a battery. But the type of battery it is describing doesn't actually exist.
It also takes 20years for a tree to grow, so I guess we should stop planting trees too. Good logic.
The rest of what you are saying is ignorant at best. "Global construction capacity" is constrained to current levels. How convenient that we can only build exactly the number of nuclear reactors we are currently building. But we can build an unlimited amount of solar panels, wind turbines and "hyrdo."
How long do you think it takes to "build hydro?" If you ignore any and all environmental costs of flooding valleys, then sure I guess you could do it pretty quickly, you'd probably have to relocate hundreds of thousands of people, but sure that sounds more feasible then building a nuclear reactor.
Current Nuclear energy production is non-renewably because of cold-war era treaties against enrichment and breeder reactors. The timeline for nuclear fuel to run out if you allow breeders, is after the sun burns out. So that's a non-issue. Not to mention other theoretical sources of nuclear fuel that we don't bother even looking at because it's cheaper to burn more coal.
If you read my comment, I specifically add a caveat for hydro.
In terms of solar and wind, of course we cannot just build unlimited amounts, but we can ramp up capacity a lot more easily and quickly than with nuclear, because it's a lot simpler and faster to build (especially solar). Imagine if we increase construction capacity by 10x tomorrow; we would still need to wait for 15 to 25 years to see any impact with nuclear, while solar and wind would go online next year.
Of course, ramping up production brings an increased risk of manufacturing faults and construction errors in all cases. But I would argue that any nuclear accident is a lot more undesirable than some solar or wind power going offline.
In terms of nuclear fuel, these alternative technologies may exist. But again, the time to market, and the fact that we are introducing a new technology into our vastly expanding production capacity just brings even more risk and uncertainty, which is completely unnecessary when extremely save and reliable, well tested alternatives exist (solar and wind).
So what I am arguing is that we focus our limited resources and money (the latter being the key factor in our economy, unfortunately) on the things that have the largest impact in the shortest amount of time, and that is solar and wind (and to an extent hydro).
And again, all that analysis is graciously disregarding the very real risks of nuclear power (instability, war, proliferation).
I disagree. I think that people make fewer mistakes in each repetition, the more times they repeat an action.
Right now nobody has mastered the building of nuclear plants. As a civilization, we’re on the equivalent of our third day on the new job. If we committed to tripling world supply, that would lead to us mastering it. We’d be at the equivalent of having been at the job for a couple years.
What does "mastering it" really mean? Usually a big part is learning from mistakes. Which I do not think is something you want to do with nuclear power.
But here is the thing. There is no resource constraint between building nuclear power and building solar or wind, or even hydro. They use difference resources, they require different sectors of the economy to realize, and they require different engineering. They don't compete with each other except in the minds of people who favor one over the other for some reason.
Nuclear competes with fossil fuels, that's it. So do renewables, but on a much more limited basis. They do not compete iwth each other. No individual or government is ever looking at a choice between Wind power and Nuclear power and choosing one over the other.
Except for funding, obviously.
And as I said, the main point is we need clean, renewable energy as soon as possible, which only solar and wind (and to some extent hydro) can provide.
What exactly do you mean by "in the meantime"? What kind of timeline do you envisage for the large scale rollout of nuclear energy? Do you seriously think it'll be possible to roll out nukes faster than building some more storage?
The problem is "some more storage" can't be done, the technology doesn't exist
Dams and railroads have existed for hundreds of years.
FYI, the railroad thing is bullshit much like towers lifting cement blocks up and down. Dams are great, but they are extremely dependent on location and most of the earth is unsuitable for them.
You'll be blown away when you learn about batteries.
facepalm
Battery technology is nowhere near good enough, or cheap enough, to support storing energy to meet the demands of entire populations.
You are not a true renewable energy bro if you allow nuclear to be built /hj
Hand job?
🥱
Does anyone actually take these decades-long pledges seriously?
From a country that's preventing shutdowns on the monthly, fuck no.
Yeah a 20 year commitment when the next party will revert all progress means nothing.
“I’m going to go to the gym three times a week until 2050!”
Then compare the effort in going to the gym three times a week with the effort in tripling the world’s supply of nuclear power.
Absolutely not and this is the shit that infuriates me about the Dems as a lefty. Too much lip service and not enough concrete action.
If you ever criticize the president, someone will undoubtedly give a long list of similar 'actions' as accomplishments to claim that you're foolish for the criticism.
Exactly. Without a proper foundation these nuclear plants are never going to get off the ground. We need concrete action. We need trucks. We need aggregate. We need forms and rebar. We need a platform to base this power generation.
Nuclear power isn't bad. I used to be anti-nuclear energy because of the specter of Chernobyl, 3 mile island, and Fukushima. But learning more about it, there haven't been many actual problems with nuclear energy.
Chernobyl happened because of mismanagement and arrogance. 3 mile happened because of a malfunction. Fukushima happened because of mismanagement and failure to keep up safety standards in case of natural events.
These are all things that can be mitigated to one extent or another. it's much cleaner than other forms of energy, outputs way more than solar or wind, and with modern technology can be extremely safe. I think we should be adopting nuclear, at least as a stopgap until renewable tech reaches higher output in efficiency.
Kinda annoyed that these investments are going into foreign countries, when we are one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas. We should be building them here first to mitigate our own ghg contributions, then helping smaller countries build theirs.
I do still have concerns about waste removal and storage tho, but I'm sure we could figure that out if we actually wanted to. But I doubt we do, because "dA cOsTs" or some shit.
Chernobyl had such a far-reaching environmental impact. Beyond even the radioactive pollution stuff, it scared everyone away from nuclear power and back to fossil fuels for energy production. I sometimes wonder where we'd be wrt CO2 levels if nuclear energy adoption had continued along the same trend as it was before Chernobyl. Would we have had substantially more time to mitigate climate change? Maybe we'd have been in the same boat (or an equally bad boat) due to other factors; maybe it would have stymied renewables even more due to already having a readily available and well-established alternative to fossile fuels in nuclear power. Idk. But if someone wrote one of those what-if alternative history novels about the subject, I'd read the heck out of it.
Imagine if every oil spill was taken as seriously
Wow. Well fucking said, my friend. You are absolutely right.
Or every preventable death from coal.
Or all the deaths resulting from our decision to rely on Russia for energy.
Damn. This one is so spot on. Definitely remembering that one for the next time the Chernobyl argument comes up.
Ironically, the main direct impact (i.e. excluding the indirect, but far more important, policy impact you talked about) is that it basically created an involuntary nature preserve.
a nature preserve with fancy radiaton-eating mushrooms, to boot! (the jury is still techinically out on whether or not they are "eating" it, but in the immortal words of Fox Mulder, I want to believe)
Nuclear is too expensive. It doesn't make sense to build new reactors.
It doesn’t make sense to build one new reactor. Tripling the world’s nuclear power generation makes a lot more sense. At that scale it’ll be cheaper.
No it won't lol
Most things decrease in price as production scales up.
Is called Economies of scale.
There's also a lot hype around process improvements such as Six Sigma. Some of this has come out of factories and into IT and software dev such as kanban boards and agile.
Strangely most think that software development does not have economies of scale.
It's not "da costs", it's actually really, really really expensive to build new nuclear reactors. Most of that comes from increased labor costs, which in turn have ballooned largely due to increased regulation and oversight requirements, which I would argue is not something we should do away with.
I wouldn't necessarily mind having a reactor or two acting as base generators especially during the winter, but
Oh wait, we're already doing that and it's already cost-effective. Now, if we were to take that process and build it at scale... for example by not spending 12-20 Bn 💶 to build another Flamanville, Olkiluoto or Hinkley Point C... I think that might actually work.
Nuclear + renewables = yay
The fact this is even a point of contention stems from grifters in the Solar industry trying to grift as much money as possible. Solar is great and we need more of it, but they actively peddle misinformation to fool people into thinking solar is the best no matter what.
Do not fall for their bullshit. Do not be a useful idiot.
Sounds like projection
Nuclear + renewables = Nuclear + coal
Two's a crowd: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201005112141.htm
And go search for "the duck curve".
https://reneweconomy.com.au/energy-insiders-podcast-the-end-of-baseload-in-worlds-biggest-standalone-grid/
It's not bad, its just bullshit. None of that shit is going to happen, and if it does happen, it'll be China leading the charge not the US.
Yeah, but China bad. Remember?
Personally don't like China, but I will say when they want shit done they get it done.
I’ll believe it when I see it. I’d prefer that they build something modern rather than hauling out the tired old plant designs we’ve been using since the 70s.
Small modular reactors are modern. And it's where the majority of the research is happening.
It's a bit of a chicken and the egg situation right now. Once the factories ramp up, they'll be pumping out some of the cheapest power producers by MW ever designed.
Unfortunately, those factories can't ramp up until the sales start coming in, and the sales aren't coming in because without the factories going full steam ahead, it's incredibly expensive to make the reactors.
Solar and wind had the exact same problem back in the day. They just didn't have two separate lobbying groups trying to kill them off.
Tbf, long term goals are a good thing. National planning having a lifespan of 4-8 years is fucking insane, and probably contributes non-trivial to federal expenditures and waste. We'd be better off if we could follow long term goals. But you're right, though, it was performative planning by and large.
Actual genuine question here. Has any US administration made a decades long plan like this, announced it to the public, and then a future administration saw said plan through to fruition?
Yes.
Unfortunately, said plan was dismantling the railroads in favor of the Interstate Highway System.
I believe both exiting Iraq and Afghanistan qualify.
Maybe not exactly what you're getting at though
That qualifies.Thanks you!
Nope.
Maybe the panama canal? The Hoover Dam? But yea not much, the US hasn't done large projects like that since private interests figured out they could milk huge sums of money by contracting and never delivering anything.
As a general fuck-up in life I’ve found it far more valuable to make promises on a timeframe I can manage, even if they’re really tiny, than to make big promises.
Long term goals? Sure. Long term deadlines? No. We're either not going to meet them and nobody is going to be held accountable. Or we are going to meet them and we could've done better.
You don't trust a person or business to keep their promise 30 years from now, why would you trust the US government?
This. A 30-year goal needs to have 30 sets of one-year objectives to be tracked.
Sounds like typical politicians.
Are US pledges like this worth much?
It depends on who you are and what you think about/place value on. This news has little value to cynics, but may have value to investors.
What does any of what you just said have to do with the US making a pledge to increase global energy sustainability (energy and fossil fuels specifically being the crux of global catastrophe)
Sometimes I think posters just like to jab for rage bait
It doesn't, I shared my experience understanding the article. Does a different perspective irritate you?
Nah, just calling out an attention addict
Only your hatred can destroy me
Wasn’t an attempt to “destroy you” but go off with your dramatic self!
i don't think you got the reference ;)
It's a waste of resources. Perfect timing for the NuScale drama https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/11/15/2781465/0/en/NuScale-Power-Corporation-Sued-By-Block-Leviton-LLP-for-Securities-Law-Violations.html
exactly, we can't spend that much to slow or stop climate change. it's not an option, the money is more valuable.
I'd say its worthwhile if space is a consideration, and better than hydro which is habbitat destroying and more consistently disasterous than nuclear. Before that we have tidal and offshore wind and municiple solar to get through... but after that I'd rather put up nuclear and geothermal than turn large swathes of wilderness into solar or wind farms.
Its wierd to have these two posts next to each other today
https://feddit.de/post/5764680
Pleges for nuclear power if photovoltaic is already cheaper?
Anyone with basic knowledge about anything knows that diversification is generally a good thing, this applies to energy as well: you don't command the wind/sun and large scale electricity storage is to this day an unsolved problem. For all the big plans we have about a greener and carbon limited future, we need large amounts of dependable cheap and low-carbon energy, nuclear very much fits the bill (in complement to the other low-carbon energies).
Large scale electricity storage is very much a solved problem actually. Bath county for instance has solved the problem since the 80's.
It's just once you take the cost of storage for solar it is no longer the cheapest power source. Our power isn't delivered by our government for the sake of sustainability and benefiting the citizens but by private corporations who want to make profit.
The pumped hydro station I linked cost 4.36 billion USD to construct in 2022 dollars back in 1985. It also has a capacity of 24,000 mWh.
Meanwhile the F-35 project cost the US government 1.7 trillion dollars.
So let's say new pumped hydro plants of a similar size would cost 10 billion dollars just for being excessive. Then let's say the US government didn't fund one jet and instead built pumped hydro storage. Then fuck it, let's say nothing worked out the budget got blown and only a fraction of that were built so only 100 stations were built to make it a nice round number.
That's 2,400 gWh
Idk about you but that is a lot of buffer to make any renewable much more stable. It's actually enough buffer to power the entire country for a few hours and ideally bridge most of the night demand. For more than three times over budget and for the price of one jet for the US military.
It's also worth noting this helps all power generation not just renewables. All power plants prefer to be kept at their most efficient output and not turn off or cool off at night while demand is low. We really just need to have a buffer for when solar isn't active but people are in the early mornings and late evenings.
Doesn’t pumped hydro storage require natural variation in elevation?
some projects use old mines for this
Yes and the bigger the difference the more potential energy you can store. Fortunately the US has lots of this naturally.
I don't want to sound pedantic, but how exactly do you believe pumped storage work? It's not that complicated: you have a dam, i.e. renewable hydro, and when you get excess electricity from elsewhere, some of the water downstream is pumped back upstream so the dam can do its thing once again. Essentially, developing hydro storage means developing hydroelectricity and dams, but if hydro's contribution to the grid hasn't increased much in a very long time, it's not because of conspiracies, but simply because most of the available capacity has been tapped already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_the_United_States
So, back to our initial problem: chemical storage (batteries) is expensive, environmentally dubious, problematic in many aspects and inefficient, chemical conversion (e.g. hydrolysis) is wasteful/inefficient, etc. So, no, we have no good answer to that.
You're not being pedantic, you're just misunderstanding. Pumped hydro storage is not a dam, it's not a power source, it is a power storage system. You can use pumped hydro at dams but basically anywhere you can move weight up high and use gravity to recoup that is a form of storage. It is one of the most efficient ways to store electrical energy with electric pumps and turbines. The point of a dam has been to collect water that is deposited there via rain and use that to create power.
80% of this is just flat wrong. Chemical storage are not expensive at scale, enviromentally safe, not really problematic, and so outrageously efficient basically nothing comes close. Hydrolysis is more of a chemical reaction in organics and creating green hydrogen is done through electrolysis. It's not wasteful or inefficient IF all of the power was surplus you had to get rid of because solar does that a lot. By your own statement solar panels are wasteful and inefficient because they only have efficiencies of what 22%?
In technical terms, could you lay out what's the difference? You've got a water retention system that empties into a generator and a capability to pump some of the water back upstream. What larger storages and generators do we have besides dams? None, and there's no topographic feature that could be at an advantage there. Because the problem at hand is one of scale: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?country=~USA
Assuming that energy demand remains the same (instead of increasing, which we know will be the case with more electrification), and that, to keep targetting those 4000TWh produced, we replace coal and gas by wind and solar. That would mean having to store what amounts to 2000TWh of production (under an extremely optimistic assumption of 80% storage capacity for the replaced energy only). That would mean that, just to buffer out what solar+wind require in storage, we would have to surpass what current hydro produces, 8 times over.
I know this isn't accurate (storage ≠ production, grid can be balanced out geographically, etc), but we are one order of magnitude in trouble already.
There is no upstream, you're thinking it's a dam but you don't dam up a stream. You have two containers at different elevations to store potential energy.
You're conflating a lot of things in this second paragraph. The world can generate enough solar for the entire planet off an area the size of new mexico. LA can power itself off just covering parking lots toe power itself. Then there's nuclear, wind, tidal... All of these need a buffer because they struggle with either inconsistent production or inconsistent demand. Pumped hydro's only purpose is to be that buffer. When you're making lots of electricity you move mass up and when you're needing more than you can produce you move mass down.
The US can power itself for the next 100 year off waste nuclear weapons alone... but nuclear wants to sit at a flat load. Because of this, you'd need brownouts to shed demand. Pumped hydro means you can run more nuclear and generate more electricity than the grid needs at night or whatever and pump water up a tube to another container.
Basically, the reason we use natural gas to generate power is because it is cheaper than anything and can be stopped/started with much less fuss. LNG tanks are pretty cheap, it comes from the ground at a determined rate... it's super convenient.
But a LiFePo battery system with inverters and solar is enough to power households if done efficiently for less than $50,000. The price gets lower every year and eventually people will be able to opt out of the grid entirely.
I mean, you don't answer the billion dollar question here. Let's not call it a dam, but a container, and let's not mention the need to pump anything. The amount of (potential) energy you can store is a function of the volume of the above container, isn't it? Then, could you estimate the amount of water this container would need to be able to retain in a scenario where the grid relies primarily on intermittent energy sources? And can you propose an engineering solution to contain this much amount of water?
The intuition here is that you are re-inventing dams, without the room to build more.
I don't agree nor disagree with the rest of what you say, I just can't get beyond the "energy storage is a solved problem" point yet.
it seems like the development of a diverse portfolio is in the works
I'm admittedly, just an internet stranger with no formal training in interpreting media or the global energy market
How about cutting our energy usage?
That's not going to happen.
Good point, you should also look into bringing the world population down to less then 100million.
You mean a maximum per* house?
This is fucking amazing! This is making my day.
Is this just an election year promise thing? Is it real?
Lots of nuclear bros being confidently incorrect in here. Same as it ever was.
Fuck no. Why not real green energy which does not produce nuclear waste that has to be stored safely for thousands of years and where most places dont have a place to store it in?
Because that's not a real issue. Not only is it true that we do have a perfectly-good place to store it that we refuse to use for no good reason, we don't actually need to store it at all because we ought to be reprocessing it instead.
Probably because we can't reach energy demands with just renewable energy.
You should look up how the power grid works. Most energy is generated on demand. When the sun isn't out and the wind isn't blowing, you have to rely on stored energy.
I don't know if you've been paying attention to energy storage technology, but it's not very good right now. Until it improves, foregoing additional sources of energy that we can generate on demand is asinine.
To be honest though, you're just a victim of propaganda that exists to funnel as much money to Solar as possible. Be careful. Whenever there is a bunch of money being passed around, there will also be a bunch of misinformation and grifters.
Every place has a place to store it. It's pretty safe and easy to store and does not need to be significantly contained for that long of a period. It's relatively safe. "Real" green energy also produces a lot of waste and dangerous byproducts that "need to be" (read, should but often not) contained. Do you think solar panels grow on trees? No, the resources need to be mines and refined.
Hi, pro-nuclear here,
That's the eventual ideal, but energy storage technology isn't there yet. The biggest issue facing renewables currently is the ability to maintain a base load demand that is increasing faster and faster each year.
Currently, the cheapest way we have to store energy is to store it chemically, in the form of coal, petroleum, or fissle fuel. Of these, the fissle option is by far the best. It's by far the most energy-dense, doesn't release any carbon into the atmosphere when used, and the amount of waste it produces is dangerous, but miniscule in comparison. All the high level waste ever produced since the late 50s could fit in a single building.
It's not realistic to fully replace everything with renewables until some very difficult engineering problems are solved. So our choices right now are:
Pros: getting cheaper and more efficient but worse than current tech, no carbon pollution
Cons: experience more power failures as it cannot meet current energy demands
Pros: very cheap and very efficient
Cons: accelerate climate change, increase pollution
Pros: can easily meet base load demands, very efficient, no carbon pollution
Cons: expensive, special waste management is required.
As things stand now, I would like to replace aging petroleum power plants with nuclear while continuing to build more and more renewables. Then, once we've either found a way to reduce energy demand or improve storage, start to phase out the nuclear plants
One big con often goes unmentioned: nuclear reactors take at least a decade to construct, often longer and they are really expensive along the way.
We don't really have time for that. We could do it in parallel to spamming as much solar and wind as we can, but in reality, more nuclear plants sadly mean less solar and wind.
Doing both sounds like a great way to finally put the reserve bank into action
Yeah, I suppose it is. Although I would argue leaving the waste to future generations is definitely not what we're doing. Basically, we're just putting it in a deep hole. Once that underground storage is full it never needs to be opened again. There isn't any shortage of radioactive elements underground that exist naturally, creating a man-made radioactive pocket deep underground isn't all that different.
The power that gets sent out over the grid does a lot more that charging your iPhone or powering your computer. For example: Electric vehicles(including public transit) relies on it, food preservation relies on maintaining constant refrigeration which would lead to even more food waste, and if a hospital loses power for even a couple minutes there are real lives at stake.
The absolute worst of the waste is done being waste within about 300 years. I'm talking about the cesium and strontium.
Everything else that comes out of that reactor can technically go back in as fuel after a little reprocessing/breeding.
But that's illegal now due to fearmongering in the 70s.
About 95% of what comes out of a reactor is uranium. One percent is plutonium. The rest is a mix of cesium, strontium, iodine, xenon, and a mix of trace elements that are there, but decay too fast to even begin to capture.
I've got an old video of the full breakdown. It includes how much those elements sell for in industrial/medical use.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I've got an old video of the full breakdown
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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We could do the alternative and leave a dead planet to future generations.
Look, we all agree that renewables are the future but they are still the future. Build nuclear now and we can slowly wean off of that. Nuclear waste is a much more manageable problem than “crops no longer grow”.
The problem is that while personal renewables exist, they're still pretty expensive and are largely untested at scale. We're in that stage that computers went through in the late 90s, where it's an expensive investment that is likely to be obsolete before the year is over.
Not many people would be excited to spend ~$30K outfitting a building with solar panels, turbines and batteries only to learn that they need to be replaced in 2-3 years.
The technology is promising, but it's not ready for mass adoption yet. We need a stopgap
Agree. I'd wager the average joe would only invest in personal renewables if it was cheaper to run than paying an electric bill in the short term, was just as efficient, and was easy to install. Otherwise we'd be adding even more e-waste to landfills.
Okay. Go study batteries and let us know when you make a breakthrough.
Lol.
Alright buddy, time to water the ficus.