If you’re interested in energy solutions and haven’t read the RethinkX report on the feasibility of a 100% solar, wind and battery solution, it’s definitely worth taking a look.
Whilst I agree that we need to decarbonise asap with whatever we can, any new nuclear that begins planning today is likely to be a stranded asset by the time it finishes construction. That money could be better spent leaning into a renewable solution in my view.
The materials needed to produce batteries and wind turbines and maintain them over time is the issue. Did your 62 page report discuss this?
Exactly this. I am “in favor” of nuclear energy, but only in the sense that I’d like fossil power to be phased out first, then nuclear. Any money that could be spent on new nuclear power plants is better spent on solar and wind.
I’d like Nuclear power not to be thrown out with the bathwater because it is practically essential for space travel/colonization in the long term. Solar panels can only get us so far, and batteries are a stop-gap. We need nuclear power because it is the only energy source that can meet our needs while being small enough to carry with us.
All should praise the magic, hot rocks.
it is practically essential for space travel/colonization in the long term.
Seems like it’s pretty important we not burn through our finite reserves of it if we can help it. I’m not saying we should reach zero nuclear, but I don’t think we should be relying on it too much either.
We are no where near close to running out of nuclear material. And for its energy density, we are unlikely to run out anytime in the next 10000 years. It can also be found in asteroids or other rocky bodies, so unlike wood or fossil fuels, Earth isn’t the only place to get it.
Doesn’t seem to be including the land usage.
Does it cover everyone on the planet using the same amount of electricity as a North American? 8 billion people now. And usage is increasing too, gotta power EVs and AI (but not limited to that).
im fine with dropping AI for more humans right now, but apparently that wont generate shareholder value.
Idk if people would drop AI… sad
Nah, they won’t. It goes bling-bling, has a couple of good use cases, but because it generates Market Hype, Companies will cram it into everything. And i hate it.
First it doesn’t matter because it’s going to happen whether we want it to or not.
Second the whole point is that electricity use per capita is always increasing.
I’m sure nuclear can be super safe and efficient. The science is legit.
The problem is, at some point something critical to the operation of that plant is going to break. Could be 10 years, could be 10 days. It’s inevitable.
When that happens, the owner of that plant has to make a decision to either:
- Shut down to make the necessary repairs and lose billions of dollars a minute.
- Pretend like it’s not that big of a deal. Stall. Get a second opinion. Fire/harass anyone who brings it up. Consider selling to make it someone else’s problem. And finally, surprise pikachu face when something bad happens.
In our current society, I don’t have to guess which option the owner is going to choose.
Additionally, we live in a golden age of deregulation and weaponized incompetence. If a disaster did happen, the response isn’t going to be like Chernobyl where they evacuate us and quarantine the site for hundreds of years until its safe to return. It’ll be like the response to the pandemic we all just lived through. Or the response to the water crisis in Flint Michigan. Or the train derailment in East Palestine.
Considering the fallout of previous disasters, I think it’s fair to say that until we solve both of those problems, we should stay far away from nuclear power. We’re just not ready for it.
Cost billions and have 10 year lead times?
Yes. Should have started more 10years ago, but doesn’t mean don’t start now.
Except we have better options than we did 10 years ago.
I’d be all for nuclear if we rolled back the clock to 2010 or so. As it stands, solar/wind/storage/hvdc lines can do the job. The situation moved and my opinion moved.
If you start building a new nuclear plant today, it’ll start generating power around the year 2045, by which time renewables with storage will have gotten even cheaper.
Bet you the public will be on the hook to pay for that white elephant because utility companies privatize profits and socialize losses.
Why do you assume it takes that long? Are you assuming US circumstances?
That’s how long they actually end up taking to build.
Look up the project history of your local NPP and see how long it was from planning approval to putting power on the grid.
It says it took 60 months on average. I guess from approval, it often took 8 years, so a decade makes sense.
Which country builds a NPP in only 5 years, China?
South Korea
Wdym 10 year lead times?
We’re reaching the point where discussing cost in regard to the energy crisis makes us look like fucking idiots.
Imagine what kids reading the history books are going to think of these discussions.
And 10 years isn’t that long really. If someone said we could use no fossil fuels in energy generation in 10 years time that doesn’t sound long at all.
Cost is a proxy for productivity and resources. So while it is stupid to say that the energy transition is too expensive, shouldn’t we rather invest our productivity and resources into a faster and cheaper solution? Drawing focus away from renewables is dangerous as others have mentioned, because it is too late to reach our goals with nuclear.
shouldn’t we rather invest our productivity and resources into a faster and cheaper solution?
We sure should. Do tell of this this faster, cheaper solution that is also adequate to meet all of our needs.
Really gives me the warm fuzzies when someone looks at changes to physical systems over time then draws a trend line into the future indefinitely without any citations or discussion of plausibility for the part they drew on.
Which part specifically do you take issue with? It’s a bounded timeframe with over 60 references. We’re already 4 years into their predicted trends and on track so it seems like they are into something.
All the charts on page 15. The ones where they extrapolate exponential improvement for a decade while only citing themselves. Their prediction is 15% annually for storage cost improvements in Li-ion batteries which they call ‘conservative’
Our analysis conservatively assumes that battery energy storage capacity costs will continue to decline over the course of the 2020s at an average annual rate of 15% (Figure 3).
Let us check if their souce updated. $139 for 2023? That isn’t a 15% decrease since 2019’s $156, let alone year over year since then, which would be under $90. In spite of last year’s drop that is still more than the 2021 price of $132. I don’t know what ‘on track’ means to you but it must be something different than it means to me.
No I don’t think so. Nuclear is super effective and consistent, especially for large setups.
Using renewables while we get our nuclear up makes complete sense. And subsidising nuclear with renewables after that also makes sense.
But the technology to rely entirely on renewables isn’t really there either.
But the technology to rely entirely on renewables isn’t really there either.
Yes, it is.
This is a book by a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering that goes into the details. We don’t need nuclear. All the tech is there.
The good safety of nuclear in developed countries goes hand in hand with its costly regulatory environment, the risk for catastrophic breakdown of nuclear facilities is managed not by technically proficient design but by oversight and rules, which are expensive yes , but they also need to be because the people running the plant are it’s weakest link in terms of safety.
Now we are entering potentially decades of conflict and natural disaster and the proposition is to build energy infrastructure that is very centralized, relies on fuel that must be acquired, and is in the hands of a relatively small amount of people, especially if their societal controll/ oversight structure breaks down. It just doesn’t seem particularly reasonable to me, especially considering lead times on these things, but nice meme I guess.
The good safety of nuclear in developed countries goes hand in hand with its costly regulatory environment, the risk for catastrophic breakdown of nuclear facilities is managed not by technically proficient design but by oversight and rules, which are expensive yes , but they also need to be because the people running the plant are it’s weakest link in terms of safety.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/646230.stm
Unless you are in Britain, where they manage to have a costly regulatory environment and poor safety outcomes because THE PEOPLE TASKED WITH KEEPING US SAFE JUST STRAIGHT UP FALSIFY RECORDS.
Renewables are better, cheaper and more scalable. Its not even close. Look at Denmark for how it can be done.
lol nuclear is really uneconommical, way too expensive and therefore really inefficient. You need 10-20 years to build a plant for energy 3 times more expensive than wind. For plants that still require mining. That produce waste we cannot store and still cannot reuse (except for one small test plant). For plants that no insurance company want to insure and energy companies dont like to build without huge government subsidies.
I know lemmy and reddit have a hard on for nuclear energy because people who dont know anything about it think its cool. But this post is ridiculous even for lemmy standards.
Idealists and reality. Natural opposites.
Renewables are unreliable. That’s a fact. Yes you have moments, days even weeks where they can deliver what is currently required. In total output. Not yet in delivers when you actually need it output.
Sure you can have 100% renewable generation for a 24hr period, but if your generation is during the day and your usage is spread into the night, you’re not really covering your needs, no matter how good it looks on paper.
It is also your current usage. Now do the math and replace all fossil fuel usage with electric alternatives. Cars, buses, trucks, heating, cooking, etc. Now calculate just how much more renewables you need to cover all that in ideal circumstances.
Now do the same for windless winter days.
If we’re going to step away from fossil fuels entirely, you’re going to have to accept nuclear as an option. Thinking we’ll manage only with renewables is a dream. While you dream, we’re burning fossil fuels non-stop. Cuz that’s reality.
You can have renewables with nuclear, or renewables with fossil fuels. You’re actively choosing renewables with fossil fuels.
ITT: ignorant people with 20+ years old knowledge.
Nuclear energy has been safe for a long time. Radioactive waste disposal is better than ever now.
Wait, I’m seeing a lot of people being very against nuclear. From what I’ve gathered, I see no downsides compared to fossil fuels
“Safe”. Yeah. Let’s talk about Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima. All that was kinda not so safe, don’t you think?
Comparatively speaking, it’s safer than coal mining. Wikipedia Nuclear Accidents by Death Toll
This is just so fucking dumb. Yeah coal sucks. We should get rid of coal as quickly as possible. But saying nuclear is safer than coal while ignoring all other forms of energy that are orders of magnitude safer is as disingenuous as it gets.
Nuclear power is actually safer than almost everything, period. Even with the major accidents. Yes, even renewables and other “green” energy.
See this comment’s chart, for example: https://lemmy.ml/comment/11910773
200 years vs. 70 years. IDK if this is comparable. Also it is so that with nuclear accidents theres a lot of additional environmental damage, not just the human casualties.
Not defending coal mining here, coal is no good energy source by all means.
Coal is often radioactive when it comes out of the ground, and thanks to poor regulations, is often radioactive when it goes into the powerplant, leading to radioactive particles coming out of the smokestacks and landing anywhere downwind of the plants.
More people have died from radiation poisoning from coal than from all of the nuclear accidents combined. But, as you said, 200 years vs. 70 years. But, also, nuclear is much more heavily regulated than coal in this regard due to the severity of those accidents. The risk of a dangerous nuclear power plant is nowhere near as large as commonly believed. It doesn’t take long to find longlasting environmental disasters due to fossil fuels, from oil spills to powerplant disasters. They’re used so heavily that it’s just so much more likely to occur and occur more often.
All this to say that fossil fuels suck all around and we should be looking at all forms of replacement for them, nuclear being just one option we should be pursuing alongside all the others.
deleted by creator
Impossible with modern reactors, technologyimproved a lot since then.
You mean the modern reactors who are still not in a commercial productive state? But even if these would be NOW ready to actually be available it’s still so that there are a vast overwhelming majority of the old reactors which are not as safe as the meme was insinuating.
Nuclear is by far the safest form of energy production. Even with the big accidents, the impact hasn’t been that big.
Chernobyl was by far the biggest, but that was 40 years ago, in a poorly designed plant, with bad procedures and a chain of human errors. We’ve learned so much from that accident and that type of accident couldn’t even have happened in the plants we had at the time in the west. Actually if the engineers that saw the issue could contact the control room right away, there would not have been any issue. In 1984 that was a problem, in 2024 not so much, we have more communication tools than ever. The impact of Chernobyl was also terrible, but not as bad as feared back in the time. In contrast to the TV series, not a lot of people died in the accident. With 30 deaths directly and another 30 over time. Total impact on health is hard to say and we’ve obviously have had to do a lot to prevent a bigger impact, but the number is in the thousands for total people with health effects. Even the firefighters sent in to fix stuff didn’t die, with most of them living full lives with no health effects. And what people might not know, the Chernobyl plant has had a lot of people working there and producing power for decades after the disaster. It’s far from the nuclear wasteland people imagine.
Fukushima was pretty bad, but the impact on human life and health has been pretty much nonexistent. The circumstances leading up to the disaster were also very unique. A huge earthquake followed by a big tsunami, combined with a design flaw in the backup power system, combined with human error. I still to this day don’t understand how this lead to facilities being closed in Germany, where big earthquakes don’t happen and there is hardly any coast let alone tsunamis. It’s a knee jerk reaction that makes no sense. Studies have indicated the forced relocation of the people living near there has been a bigger impact on people’s health than anything the power plant did.
Compare this to things we consider to be totally normal. Like driving a car, which kills more people in a week than ever had any negative impacts from nuclear power.
Or say solar is a far more safe form of power, even though yearly hundreds of people die because of accidents related to solar installations. Or for example hydroplants, where accidents can also cause a huge death toll and more accidents happen.
And this is even with the non valid comparison to the current forms of energy where we know it’s a big issue. But because the alternative isn’t perfect, we don’t change over.
Still less radiation than coal plants release in normal operation.
All of those were caused by human mistake. But this does not mean that they must be discarded. Because human mistake happens. If it is with a solar panel, it’s inconsequential. Not with a nuclear reactor. So yes, it is an issue to consider, but in truth all it means is that we have to be VERY careful
If it is so that a human mistake can cause a big number of casualties and massive environmental damage it is far from safe, even if you are very careful.
I work with people. Human mistakes are inevitable
No it is not. If you calculate in the future money tax payers have to pay to keep the nuclear waste safe (for thousands of years) or the cost of a larger incident like Chernobyl or Fukushima which also has to be paid by the tax payers then the ‘cheap nuklear power’ is not so cheap as it looks like…
The disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima are symptoms of a greater issue: construction and maintenance of an extremely volatile and sensitive process reliant upon the integrity of infrastructure and quality of manpower.
Nuclear requires a stable society and economy flush with resources and education and little to no risk of political stability.
Those places are welcome to invest heavily into nuclear while CO2 concentrations build up as emmissions continue unabated.
Nuclear waste is still an unsolved problem that absolutely no one wants to touch with a ten foot pole. Also nuclear power is a pretty expensive method of power generation and can’t be insured, leaving all risk of disaster on the shoulders of society. To be clear: society will be pretty fucked when a nuclear disaster happens anyway.
It’s a lot better than coal, though.
Storage of nuclear waste is solved. It’s unbelievable that people say it’s not.
Edit here https://youtu.be/lhHHbgIy9jU
You posted a 18 min Youtube video, sponsored or at least supported and sanctioned by a nuclear power plant operator.
At least point to the section of the video where the source of your claim is.
Digging hole. Problem solved.
Nuclear waste is a much smaller problem than most people think. The waste is very little and can be stored underground for eons without much risk.
Yes it exist for a long time, but one kilo of uranium produces as much energy as 16 ton coal, and leaves behind 47 grams of nuclear waste.
I could not find the 47 grams figure on the page you linked, where is that stated exactly?
World Nuclear Association’s mission is to facilitate the growth of the nuclear sector by connecting players across the value chain,
I would not ca that trustworthy. There not even close to independent.
I like your pitch black humour.
It’s unsafe, not renewable, not independent from natural resources (which might not be present in your country, so you need to buy from dictators) and last but not least crazy expensive.
Need to buy from dictators?
I didn’t realize Australia and Canada who has highest uranium reserves are dictators. Canada also used to be highest uranium producer until relatively recently.
There is no need. Though Kazakhstan and Russia may be cheapest if you’re near there.
It’s not renewable, but known reserves will power the world for a century, based solely on current average efficiency and not modern improvements
AFAIK in the USA, nuclear energy is the safest per unit energy generated. Solar is more “dangerous” simply because you can fall off a roof.
Nuclear energy has huge risks and potential for safety issues, yes. But sticking to the numbers, it is extremely safe.
Nah renewables are the best we’ve got
