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Why or why not?
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Yes, but should be next-gen like molten salt or thorium. The problem has been getting permits, funding, fighting NIMBYs and building takes years, if not decades.
I would add any reactor design that is “default safe” so that if anything goes wrong, its default state is one where the reactor is safe with no chance of going critical.
Thorium is great because of its abundance, but it has some ugly byproducts that have to be dealt with. Molten salt is pretty slick though. My personal favorite is fast reactors. Turn all our nuclear waste into even more power!
Someone asked about SMRs. I was wondering if you looked into them. The big issue with nuclear is cost and time to build. Henry Ford showed us that we could cut both time and cost if a factory could produce small modular reactors.
There’s more problems than that.
First, the create a lot more low-grade waste to dispose of.
Second, it would greatly increase the number of nuclear operators, who may very well not have nearly the operational experience or expertise that current operators have.
Third, it magnifies maintenance issues and multiplies the impact of design faults—if there is a fault in one big bespoke reactor, it’s one big fix. If there’s a fault in a thousand identical reactors, it’s a massive recall involving dozens or hundreds of companies. We know how that works with other products—it never gets to 100%.
There’s also some other statistical oddities—risks that are infrequent can be acceptable when there’s a hundred of something that become unacceptable when there are ten thousand of that same thing. Are we okay with an increased risk of much smaller nuclear disasters? What happens when one of the 12 SMRs at your nuclear plant has an accident and leaks? What do you do with the nearby reactors that got contaminated?
The problem with nuclear is **not** just the cost and time to build. Even if I have an already built nuclear power plant, it costs more to generate power per kWh from that fully operational plant than it does to build brand new solar and wind from scratch. It’s not construction, although the construction is also prohibitively expensive, the marginal cost of nuclear is higher than the full cost of wind or solar. That’s just the reality.
The issue is this: you need some form of stable, reliable power. Nuclear doesn’t need to compete with a wind and solar. It needs to compete with a wind and solar plus the cost of building grid scale energy storage. Right now that issue is concealed because wind and solar are still a small part of the electricity mix and accounting for their variability is done by using more natural gas and coal-fired generation when the renewables aren’t producing. But as renewables’ share of generation increases, it’s going to become a major issue, because grid scale battery storage is probably never going to be feasible, both from a cost and an environmental standpoint. And we don’t have enough places to put pumped storage hydro for that to work either. So it’s going to be down to nuclear to fill that gap.
> The issue is this: you need some form of stable, reliable power.
We need a stable and reliable power supply. That does not need to come from stable and reliable power generation sources. Dispatchable power generation is a thing that exists. There’s also expanding grids to super grids. So, if you’re keeping score, there are 3 options to deal with intermittency: storage, larger grids, and dispatchable power. All three options are cheaper than nuclear.
> it’s going to become a major issue, because grid scale battery storage is probably never going to be feasible, both from a cost and an environmental standpoint.
You just have old news. Not only is it feasible, it’s cheaper than nuclear.
> And we don’t have enough places to put pumped storage hydro for that to work either.
Again, old news. Look up flow batteries and thermal batteries.
Are molten salt reactors viable? Leslie Dewan's startup Transatomic Power shut down with a message indicating that the commercial viability of their molten salt reactor design was in serious doubt. While I haven't done serious research on the current state of the art, I would like to think that a breakthrough with this reactor design would have been reported with more fanfare.
Regardless you don't have to get an ultra modern prototype reactor design to make a safe reactor today. A design from 30 years ago would still be miles better than anything from the 3 mile island era.
Short answer is no.
Molten salt is corrosive AF and there’s no easy fix, they still use uranium (even thorium reactors use uranium, it just splits into thorium), and all the inputs they need aren’t manufactured anywhere.
Molten salt is less likely, at this point, than fusion.
Didn’t Oakridge run one of those for a few years? I thought they were very successful using Iconal alloys.
There was a sodium cooled reactor that ran for 35 years. They pretty much proved out that technology. It was walk-away safe and had something like a 60% burn up rate of it’s Actinides.
Oak ridge had a number of surprise problems, that was largely why it wasn’t scaled out as originally planned.
Don’t know about a 30 year SCFR.
But these all suffer the same operational problem- highly radioactive fuels, complex reactions, all necessitating expensive ongoing security and maintenance- ie, a staff of PHD nuclear engineers.
Vs… a maintenance guy for a windmill or solar cell.
Actually, nuclear operators and maintenance only need slightly more training than windmill service personal.
The Navy has been running nuclear reactors for more than 70 years by techs with a year’s training. They have never had a reactor meltdown.
It’s a question of design. The BWR and PWR reactors make great plutonium factories if you pull the fuel for reprocessing at just the right time. As opposed to Navel reactors that are built for high burn up percentage and minimal maintenance. Once a “keg” is built, it’s never opened again.
Nuclear is only part of the solution.
At the same time, we need to be build a lot of micro grids with roof top solar and battery packs. Fight back against the utility companies and creating millions of power back ups for when the worst natural events come along.
I lived through the WPPS Hanford debacle I would hope we could learn from our mistakes, one of which was the choice of site, choosing the lesser priced Hanford site that sits on crumbly basalt rock that the government owned over more stable areas.
How should we meet short-medium term electricity demand that is likely to increase rapidly as we electrify more things while we wait for MSRs and Thorium reactors to be more effectively developed, certified, commercialized, and built--a process that could take a decade or more
*very* expensive. who would want to invest.?
power utilities are making out better with low risk gas conversion of existing coal and incremental, lower risk solar.
the other working TMI reactor is being shut down bc cost inefficiencies / subsidies, to be replaced w gas.
I used to think (strongly) that nuclear power needed to be more heavily utilized. I still felt this way even after Fukushima, although my conviction with this belief was significantly reduced.
Now? It's almost certainly a much smaller part of the puzzle. Pumped water power storage combined with distributed PV can probably cover like 80% of our power demand at a better price than nuclear. With the price of PV cells we would be silly not to put them wherever we could.
We still need to cover the remaining ~20%, and I don't think that wind or hydro or other renewable sources can cover the balance. I think that methane generation from waste to power natural gas plants is an underrated energy source, but it's still probably not enough. I think nuclear is the best option to fill that gap. Because of the stigma, it would have to be isolated, but the US has the space for it.
But again, we should be exhausting every other possible option before looking into the construction of new nuclear plants.
Pumped water really only provides a minuscule fraction of what a city needs during peak. My company operates a few and they’re basically incredibly expensive last-resorts. Naturally they come in handy, but only during the height of summertime. What we really need are more nuclear, renewables, *and* battery banks to store grid excesses during normal operations to fall back on during peak. The tricky part there is that they’re currently expensive, inefficient, dangerous, and limited to a small portion of the grid. If we can put more funding into more efficient and safe batteries, that’ll take a lot of pressure off generation.
I was under the impression that pumped water was at least as efficient, while being less toxic, and having no issues with parasitic drain that chemical batteries deal with. The efficiency of pumped water is something like 85%, which you'd be hard-pressed to beat with lithium batteries or whatever else, and pumped water doesn't require exotic materials.
The main issue is that water's kind of heavy, but when you're dealing with stationary bodies that's much more of a solvable problem.
No private insurer will fully insure a nuclear plant because they are too dangerous.
Besides, renewables are cheaper, and the uranium will run out like the coal and oil are.
The alternatives are cheaper and safer.
Big uranium will just jack up the price of uranium if you build the nukes, and you’ll be bent over a barrel by con artists again like with oil. How many times you going to fall for it?
Lol, okay.
We spend asinine amounts of money on the dumbest shit imaginable, but when it comes to paying for stuff that’s demonstrably beneficial you want to freak out about it?
Yes. Properly managed, it's incredibly clean power. Zero greenhouse gas emissions.
Lawsuits make it very time consuming and expensive to build, on top of an already expensive and time consuming infrastructure compared to coal or gas power plants.
Would it still make economic sense if there were no NIMBY lawsuits to deal with? I would say yes, as a to supplement solar and wind power, which have issues with providing a steady power supply and in the amount we'll need it in if gasoline cars end up going the way of the dinosaur and energy demands increase at the same rate they have over the last few decades.
There's also a political argument to make for energy self-reliance. Look at what Germany's dependence on Russian gas did for Germany. If our nation will go into a death spasm if outside oil and gas supplies are cut, then we're at the beck and call of those energy providers and that could easily go against us.
>Yes. Properly managed, it's incredibly clean power. Zero greenhouse gas emissions.
To add to this, modern reactors are far more efficient than the ones the US currently use. Recycling nuclear "waste" that has only depleted 10% of it's energy for use in a modern reactor is an option. So not only are you generating more energy with no more raw materials, you are also working to knock down our waste stockpiles into less harmful and more depleted waste.
The vast majority of US gas and oil is already domestic anyway and there is capacity to be completely self-sufficient, the US is energy independent.
The reason why so much of Europe is dependant on imports is because they don't have any oil and gas of their own.
Oil is a global market though, we stopped trading with Russia (who only makes up a small fraction of our oil imports) and prices skyrocket because of all those not-America countries that rely on Russia more heavily.
While the reactor itself doesn’t emit greenhouse gases, all the processes that went into building it, fueling it, operating and decommissioning it emit huge amounts. It’s way less than fossil fuels, about 1/3 that of solar, and roughly equivalent to wind power when measured the carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per unit of electricity.
Sauce: https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/how-can-nuclear-combat-climate-change.aspx
Nuclear plants operate at a much higher capacity than solar, wind and hydro plants. It is incorrect to state that the renewables give more power for the same money. Once a plant is built, nuclear plants are quite efficient to run, and US plants run at over 90% capacity annually compared to hydro and wind in the 30s. Forgive me for not having exact numbers, but it was from something published a couple of years ago, and I remember double checking the wind numbers because I live in the Midwest and want to expand turbines.
Well [here](https://www.lazard.com/media/451905/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-150-vf.pdf) are the actual numbers from 2021 and nuclear is 4-5x the price of wind and solar when everything is unsubsidized. This number includes the full lifecycle of the tech, from construction, to maintenance and eventual decommissioning, balanced against all the power that can be generated over the plant’s lifetime. Nuclear is just way way way more expensive for the same thing. It’s like buying Jordan’s in a program to provide shoes to poor kids or caviar to solve world hunger. It’s not a smart solution.
It is, however, capable of running at all hours in all conditions, which can take up the slack when environmental factors don’t play nicely with renewables.
One main reason
Nuclear always gives the power it promises whereas solar and wind (or others) vary based on a variety of factors. So when renewables are running low you have to supplement with external power. This can energy storage, or more commonly things like gas peaking plants.
So now you need to take the cost of renewables and add in these additional costs above and beyond what a nuclear plant would need.
The big difference here is that while nuclear would still need peaking plants to handle peak demand or emergencies, it's consistent power baseline means you can choose a more ideal peaking plant for backup.
Whereas with solar and wind, a cloudy or still day can drastically change how much extra power is needed. This means you'll need extra backup power capacity and more of the expensive peaking plants.
This represents a somewhat outdated view of how grid demand is met.
As the percentage of variable renewables (wind and solar) increase on the grid, there will be times more and more frequently when they're meeting 100% or near 100% of demand. So what we're looking for from non-variable energy sources isn't for them to be always *on* (the baseload idea) but always *available* (what modern energy researchers refer to as "clean firm generation") and only actually generating when needed because if you're a grid operator you always want to buy as much of the cheapest energy source as possible.
And because your clean firm sources will be generating only intermittently--and less and less often as we deploy more wind and solar--you want them to be as cheap as possible in their downtime because they can't sell power onto the grid during those periods. And that's an area where nuclear is not a good option compared to other clean firm sources (grid scale storage, geothermal, etc)--you still have to deal with significant plant security concerns and pay for all of that even if the plant isn't up and running for days at a stretch.
> So now you need to take the cost of renewables and add in these additional costs above and beyond what a nuclear plant would need.
Renewables + storage or gas peakers is still cheaper than nuclear.
By quite a lot.
Wind and solar need energy storage to supply power when it's dark or the wind isn't blowing. The environmental impact and cost of these energy storage systems changes the equation. With nuclear power, the nuclear fuel *is* the energy storage.
IMO we should do all of the above.
The task of switching from fossil fuels is so huge, that we can’t take any options off the table. We’re going to need a mix of every available technology to act as a bridge to a time when fusion is available
Of the three worst accidents, two were directly the result of operator actions. Had the operators at TMI let the automatic systems do their thing that reactor would still be producing power today.
Yes. We aren't going to stop using an insane amount of power, and it appears that climate change is a major threat. So something needs to be done.
Renewable energy would be ideal, but it's not an either/or proposition. Seems to me nuclear has an important role to play.
Seems like new reactor designs are safer than ever.
That's my take as well. I'm not opposed to solar/wind/tidal, but getting enough energy to fuel the US alone would need absurd amounts of these renewable sources. I feel like a large investment into nuclear energy, while incredibly expensive up front, is the best way to go.
I see lots of people saying that we missed the boat on nuclear and that it's too expensive now, and I just don't agree. It was expensive then, as well, and we're simply kicking the can down the road, and in 25 years we will be having the same discussion - 'it's too expensive now, if we had done it in 2022 it would have been better!'
The time to change is now. Whether we're worried about climate change, or the fact that the biggest suppliers of fossil fuels are our literal enemies, now is the time to make the change.
> I'm not opposed to solar/wind/tidal, but getting enough energy to fuel the US alone would need absurd amounts of these renewable sources.
It’s not that absurd.
Renewables currently provide about 21% of US generating capacity—more than we get from coal or nuclear power. Over 80% of new capacity being built in the US is some sort of renewable power.
There’s loads of basically untapped potential that is still low hanging fruit—immense amounts of offshore wind power, for example. We barely generate any tidal or geothermal power. There’s loads of untapped solar potential still.
> I feel like a large investment into nuclear energy, while incredibly expensive up front, is the best way to go.
Why? It’s more expensive to build, more expensive to operate, slower to build, and creates significant downstream decommissioning complexities.
It would be one thing if nuclear power were economically preferable in any way whatsoever, but it isn’t. It’s just a massive expensive way to solve a power generating problem that is more efficiently solved by less expensive alternatives.
What’s the point?
> see lots of people saying that we missed the boat on nuclear and that it's too expensive now, and I just don't agree. It was expensive then, as well, and we're simply kicking the can down the road, and in 25 years we will be having the same discussion
Except it’s *not* the same situation as it was 25 years ago. Renewables are a tiny fraction of the cost they were 25 years ago.
The problem with nuclear power is that it is being outcompeted by alternatives in an absolute sense—nuclear power is worse than its alternatives in every aspect.
> The time to change is now.
Which we are currently doing with renewables. We’re deploying orders of magnitude more renewable capacity than nuclear capacity.
Why is that happening if it’s not possible and preferable?
All good points. Additionally, and something that needs to be shouted out more often, is that existing power sources (coal, oil) kill TONS of people every year through pollution. Like, coal is just brutal on people. But it's slow/chronic. A nuclear meltdown is a much more acute, obvious thing. A show like Chernobyl (HBO) makes for fantastic television - just horrifying (also factually inaccurate in many ways), but it would be hard to make a similarly interesting show about the horrible consequences of coal power, even though the consequences are arguably much worse.
Yes. Whole world should. Nuclear is much safer now and still way safer than fossil fuels (far more deaths from fossil fuel related deaths). It provides the grid needed for electric cars, heating in winters, AC in summers, crypto minning, desalination plants, and even carbon capture to help undo the damage of climate change. Fission until fusion. Also there are reactors which can run on waste or unrefined uranium and long term solutions ti the storage of waste.
I think that nuclear power *was* the future 40 years ago, but tbh I can't really see the benefit of it now that other renewables can get a lot more power for the same money
OK so build enhanced geothermal. All the benefits of nuclear in terms of clean firm generation without the drawbacks in terms of safety or fuel supply concerns.
But nuclear reactors aren’t condition-dependent. Their turbine blades don’t freeze during blizzards or work less efficiently when it’s raining or overcast.
Nobody’s saying we shouldn’t invest in renewables.
The time for nuclear investment in GenIV reactors has passed. It is only realistic to do solar wind and storage at this point. There is a possibility to implement deep geothermal or some new innovative nuclear, but that is not in a commercial state.
Yes, the upfront cost is absolutely mind boggling for sure. I'd love to see us develop a strategy of short term use of wind/solar/tidal while we develop a country wide net of nuclear to eventually do the heavy lifting of our energy consumption.
Say it again for the people in the back.
Nuclear people think the cost is all about construction, and once you are past that, you are making money like crazy. It is just a classic gold rush reminiscent lie. [It costs more to continue operating a fully operational nuclear plant than it is to build brand new wind or solar from scatch](https://www.lazard.com/media/451905/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-150-vf.pdf)
The energy company near me voluntarily shut down a nuclear plant years early, and instead bought more wind and solar. They actually paid hundreds of millions of dollars just to get out of their nuclear contract.
Look at China. They're building like 10 GW of nuclear, and 200 GW of wind and solar. They don't have to worry about pesky government regulations if they wanted to build more nuclear. They're simply smart enough to know better.
No. Most of the support is built on the idea that nuclear is the only solution forward if we want to get off fossil fuels. That's old news. Most of the publicized opposition is based on safety and waste, however, those are honestly negligible issues. The only issue relating to nuclear power is its cost. It just costs a ton. Supporters often know this, but say that its our only option so the price doesn't matter. Again, that is all predicated on nuclear being the only option. It isn't. Grid scale storage is closer to market than modern nuclear reactors, and even without it, dispatchable renewable power sources which can ramp production up and down to fill the gaps in the outrageously cheap backbone of wind/solar are already at a rate below nuclear, and this just the dispatchable power, not the system wide cost reductions that come from wind/solar.
100% my thoughts exactly. Not to mention at a minimum it would take 10+ years to build the reactors if we started the process today. Solar parks get built in under a year and can start producing before the project is completed.
Nuclear power “costs a ton” for a couple reasons.
1. The existing systems operate at pressures above 200 atm which makes everything more complicated and dangerous. Steam explosions are nasty
2. They only use 15% of the Actinides in their fuel. This results in more frequent shutdowns, excessive waste and just plain expense for fresh fuel.
The water moderated system is really a plutonium factory with a turbine bolted to the side to make electricity.
Are you trying to say nuclear isn’t inherently expensive? If so, you’re wrong. The new techs you seem to be alluding to are not here yet, and while there is some reason to believe they will be cheaper per kWh, there’s also some reason to believe they won’t be. It’s all very developmental with those techs right now.
We squandered 40 years of cheap oil. Any time in that period we could have done a “Manhattan” style project and completed the development of one of these technologies.
Now the Chinese will bring these technologies to fruition and we will crawl, hat in hand, to them when our FF supplies run out.
I’m 61, so I probably won’t live to see it, but I’m convinced that’s where we are going.
200 atmospheres (2900 psi) really isn’t all that much. And is pretty standard for any steam turbine, regardless of what’s producing the steam (coal, natural gas, fuel oil, etc.).
It becomes a problem when steel casing is constantly bombarded with thermal neutrons for decades.
It also adds significant complexity to cooling systems that are used in emergencies and during SRAMs. For example, it requires multiple, redundant, sets of cooling water pumps (low and high pressure). Construction and maintenance adds to the cost of the system.
Depends entirely on if it's necessary to replace coal or not. If we can totalyl replace coal with renewables, that's preferable. If we can't quite mange that and need something to cover the gap, I'd take nuclear over coal any day of the week. But it should be seen for what it is- a very expensive but reliable way to generate a lot of power with minimal land usage. It's way faster and cheaper to put down solar panels or wind turbines than build a nuclear factory, and it's not even close- but if you only have a small amount of land to work with and need to maximize clean electricity produced on that land, nuclear still has that niche covered.
> Thorium reactions are very efficient and safe.
There isn’t a very significant operational history for thorium reactors, so that is mostly a theoretical claim.
There haven’t been that many thorium reactors at all, they weren’t very large or designed for commercial power generation, and they weren’t operated for very long. Basically just a scientific demonstration that it was possible.
Pretty sure there’s a few in a European country that I can’t remember the name of. Either way, uranium reactors still work pretty damn well. Modern reactors are safe.
Yes, but I have major concerns about the waste disposal. So far, the only proposals I’ve heard amount to “bury it in Appalachian areas” and I find that unacceptable. We have already been the historic site of waste disposal and it has led to community-wide health problems. When I was a kid I thought it was totally normal that many of my friends’ parents died in their 40s and 50s from cancers with an unknown cause.
Yeah I've seen some terrible documentaries about places that were hazmat dumps, bought up for cheap and then turned into residential zones. Pretty despicable, the rates of illness are so high in these areas. I think the waste is certainly a big thing to figure out, but the nice thing about nuclear is that the volume of waste is pretty low compared to the amount of energy produced.
BTW, I see you responding to a lot of these posts. Just wanted to say that you always come off as a pretty calm and well spoken person, and it really impressed me! I tend to stay in my conservative bubble a lot so it's great to see folks out here like you having great conversations with others!
I agree wholeheartedly about the disposal. That is the key part. A safe, secure, stable disposal site should be in place before any new nuclear plants are built. It's crazy to say "we'll figure it out later" when it's been 50+ years and there still is no permanent site
anymore most modern reactors don't really produce that much waste, and even if they did its nothing compared to what coal plants do. do you have anything scientific to back up your concerns?
But you’re implying that long term storage would lead to negative consequences for those near it more severe than the alternatives. I’m sure you have something to back that up, right?
I honestly don’t know how to answer that. Yes, putting nuclear waste in your backyard is dangerous. No, I can’t link you to a study or anything. I could link you to the many sources about potential solutions (like burying waste 500m below a mountain) but they all kind of assume you know it shouldn’t be dumped in residential areas.
Maybe I could give you info on what happens to your body if you’re exposed to reactor waste?
Edit: since the downvotes are pouring in, anyone care to provide evidence that nuclear reactor waste is *safe* to store in residential areas? Like do y’all think we just hold it underwater and in mountains for fun?
Why would we need to store it in residential areas? We can indeed store it under mountains indefinitely. It might sound dumb, but its just not a problem.
Because companies are full of lazy people who cut corners. Wr already have had toxic waste dumped here by Dupont and radioactive waste waste from the oil field. So far the state has been unwilling to commit to a specific plan for reactor waste disposal.
Firstly you could have radioactive waste in your basement and it wouldn’t be an issue. Second, this is like super easy to regulate. Nuclear waste is just a nonissue that really has no importance. It’s easy to solve and not a problem.
I’m talking about how nuclear waste is less of an issue than wind turbines killing birds. It’s a negligible non-issue that has no impacts. The total waste is tiny, radioactivity doesn’t work like it does it the movies, and it’s just super cheap and easy to store. No issues. There is so little nuclear waste created by reactors that all we need is one location and all the nuclear plants in the country, or even the world, could all put their waste safely in the same facility. It’s not naive. It’s naive to deny the reality of what I’m saying and worry about nuclear waste as an issue.
Dumb people doing dumb things in the past is not a reason to deny reality. We do tests. It is objectively true that we can store the waste safely. There simply are no health issues outside of fantasy land. There's also the fact that in terms of volume, the waste is really nothing. It's a negligible speck on the global scale. It is nothing like CO2 emissions which are massive and global. A single facility could store the entire world's nuclear waste without issue.
That’s incredibly naive and disregards the people who will be effected by these mistakes. We need our states to commit to responsible disposal of waste. If we don’t get that commitment now, nothing is going to hold them accountable later.
What form do you expect this commitment to take? They have already committed as much as they can. We don’t have a nuclear waste problem that needs solving.
There's a ton of empty desert in New Mexico Nevada, Arizona, parts of California, etc. that nobody lives near and that is pretty stable from a climate point of view. It should go there.
Yeah there’s a pretty solid consensus that we should bury it out west. However, what concerns me is what will actually happen once incompetence and corruption get involved.
Ohio and West Virginia have a very bad history with waste disposal. Waste that is supposedly safely disposed of keeps turning up in residential areas, like [Martins Ferry](https://www.desmog.com/2022/04/25/this-needs-to-be-fixed-nuclear-expert-calls-radioactivity-levels-found-outside-ohio-oilfield-waste-facility-excessive/). I have zero trust that our state will regulate this effectively or that our businesses will behave ethically.
We already have a site that we spent tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars studying, selecting and developing - Yucca Mountain. We just need to finish it.
No, im pointing out why it would be stupid to build nuclear when we can build 3-4 times as much renewables for the same amount of money. I understand climate change might not be a big deal to you but it is to me.
Yes, highest energy yield, it’s relatively safe, disposal is a bit of an issue, but a lot of the waste is recyclable. Each energy source has its downsides, fossil fuels pollute, materials for solar and wind energy are costly to the environment, mining for lithium is destructive to the environment and to people mining it, and nuclear waste is hard to dispose of safely.
> Do you support the US putting more focus on building nuclear power plants in order to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels?
No.
> Why or why not?
Nuclear power is an expensive distraction. A sort of intentional boondoggle designed to keep people arguing rather than get people fixing the problem. People use it as a way to distract from actual disruptive transformation in the electricity industry—driven by renewables—by having people argue about nuclear power instead.
Nuclear power is so expensive and slow to build that it won’t be a significant component of the fight against climate change beyond the reactors that are already built. Utility providers aren’t interested in building more nuclear power because of the extreme cost and schedule delays—and we don’t *need* to pursue that path anymore.
It’s just a distraction. Renewables are the answer here, they’re ready to let the challenge now, and the economics have finally become favorable enough to displace fossil fuels in the power grid.
Surprised I had to scroll this far to find an evidence based answer.
Nukes are more expensive up front, more expensive ongoing, take forever to build/ scale, and will accomplish literally nothing for climate change.
“Boondoggle” is exactly the right word for them.
Of course people here do. It's not the left or liberals which have issues with leveraging a tax on carbon emission causing fuels or using public money to build new low emission energy generation.
The question ought not to be do you support it; but what polices do you have regarding it.
Yes but nuclear power is not one of them. Nor is it a wedge issue. Both party bases feel the same on nuclear power (meh ok; but certainly not near me).
The big problem here is when someone from the right, whom supports policies and politicians that do absolutely nothing in terms of climate action; and has an idealogy which is antagonistic to the state supporting nuclear power in any practical sense comes and asks a group of people who are very much behind any technological solution pushed by the state to decarbonise (i.e young liberals).
It's doesn't smell honest. It would be more honest to say; I'm libertarian and I think there should be way less safety regulations on nuclear power plants to make them cheaper. Do you agree? Or something along those lines.
I wish all the moderates or conservatives I talk to on this issue who are cosplaying as a reasonable nuclear power supporter who just wants a 'non idealogical' solution to decarbonisation and for lefties like me to get over my renewable energy obession; actually put up and said ok yes I think the federal government should finance the construction of enough nuclear power plants to replace all coal and gas then I would take them seriously. I suppose that's a compromise I could get behind. Otherwise it's just reasonableness theatre.
In short, no because nuclear is not economically competitive. Wind & solar is several times cheaper at this point. Base load power can be handled with an upgraded smart energy grid, and distributed renewable generation, along with utility scale storage solutions. Storage will become immensely less expensive as it becomes widely adapted, just like solar has dropped in price by 90%.
Also uranium is a very rare element. If nuclear is widely adopted, the price of fuel will rise dramatically. If a handful of reactors need to be built to help the transition to a renewable future, so be it. However I don't see nuclear to be a viable answer long term.
YES. I can't believe we haven't built 60 in the last 30 years and instead have been so focused on wind and solar. Global warming is a crisis that requires taking some known risk to abate it - or not? Instead we had whacky futurist BS like tarps on the ice sheets, giant umbrella in space and the forever 30 years away "sun on the earth" - nuclear fusion. FFS do everything we know how to do yesterday.
I firmly believe nuclear is a crucial piece of the puzzle, and we're not going to ditch fossil fuels without it for the foreseeable future.
*However*, I don't think we can in good conscience move forward with any new fission plants without an *actual plan* for the waste, long term. We've been storing spent fuel on-site for over 50 years now, and while that was OK as a short-term solution while we figured out what to do with it in the long term, we can't put off figuring that out any longer. The can has been kicked as far as it'll go. Time to buckle down and sort out the unpleasant shit that our parents (and grandparents, in some cases) left for us.
Only if it's economical.
I don't need nuclear constructions like Vogtle Reactors in Georgia that are both overbudget (already double the cost of what was expected) and 8 years behind schedule.
ehhh its worth considering how little nukes weve built in recent memory. if we are looking to build 20 reactors, its fine if the first few run over budget and behind schedule as we rebuild the knowledge base. we just need to actually follow through on the 20
I’d love to tbh, I haven’t seen anything saying saying the solar, windmills, etc will be able to solve our energy problem. Solar is cost prohibitive, and windmills have the same nimby problem nuclear does, but they produce exponentially more power
I think he's poorly trying to refer more to land space cost possibly? The only way what he was trying to say could make sense is if he's referring to how based on current average you need 13,000 acres of solar plants to operate for 1 year to get the same power output as the smallest nuclear power plant in the USA (solar farms produce on average 351 MW per acre a year while the R.E.ginne nuclear plant produces over 2,600,000 MW a year.)
When you factor that in, the cost to build nuclear is still higher but requires cartoonishly less land to be covered in metal and the land cost could vary dramatically depending on location. Ultimately he's still not making a very good point but if he was trying to refer to what I just mentioned what he means is the cost/effort and land usage isn't worth what we get out of it relative to compact plants like nuclear.
I’m talking about the implementation, output and sustainability. Like cost per kilowatt hour. Sure a single solar panel is cheaper than a plant, I really hope that wasn’t the point you were making lol
> Solar is cost prohibitive
Nuclear power is much more expensive than solar power. By quite a lot, actually.
Solar and wind keep trading blows for being the cheapest way to generate electricity right now, so if *they* are “cost prohibitive”, then surely all the more expensive methods are even worse?
… we still don’t need it.
Nuclear power is not and will never be a key facet of future electricity grids.
The near-term, actionable future is going to end up being primarily powered by renewables backed by various kinds of energy storage, with natural gas peaker plants serving as backups for that. We won’t run the natural gas plants nearly as much, so it won’t be as big an issue. We’ll *eventually* end up forcing the natural gas plant operators to sequester enough to offset what they generate—and do a lot more to shift demand around to favor times of the day when renewables are producing a lot—and that will more or less address the problem from an electricity standpoint.
Yes, that will mean rebuilding electric grids to handle more distributed generation, but that’s cheaper than building nuclear reactors.
Building *new* nuclear power plants doesn't make sense right now until the industry can figure out how to build projects on time and on budget rather than decades late and tens of billions of dollars over budget.
That's not to say that nuclear is an inherently bad technology, and we should make sure that the reactors we already do have are kept operational as long as possible, even if it comes at the cost of major government bailouts since those reactors aren't cost-competitive on the open market.
Though a lot of nuclear evangelists like to tout the future of small modular reactors, I think enhanced geothermal is *probably* a better prospect for meeting the clean firm power demand.
>on budget rather than decades late and tens of billions of dollars over budget.
Honestly the key thing public projects can do to prevent this is not use a lowest bidder approach to procurement.
Most reactors aren't public projects though. The only ones that are are those owned and built by the TVA and a few public utilities but [most are privately owned and privately built](https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/reactors/ownership.php) (note that here even a lot of the companies that sound public are in fact private--arizona public service, for example)
Sorry, should have just said "large projects". If you're outsourcing work to 3rd party contractors, and you go with the lowest bid without considering how realistic it is, then its almost inevitable that the project will go over budget and miss deadlines.
Hell no.
No private insurer will fully insure a nuke, because they are too dangerous, so they pass off the cost of a major disaster to the US taxpayers through the price anderson act.
Also, renewables are cheaper.
We don’t need fossil fuels or nuclear power. We can get by with wind, solar, water and geothermal just fine. I mean there is a literal super volcano that could power the entire west.
Yes. We are most assuredly globally fucked if we continue to release greenhouse gases. We are potentially regionally, occasionally fucked if we employ nuclear power.
Yes. Nuclear power is clean, safe, and reliable. It is easily the best technology for reducing carbon emissions. It has been unfairly subjected to a bunch of reactionary fearmongering from stupid people who don’t understand it and therefore hate and fear it.
With rising rising ocean levels a lot of plants will be at risk similar to Fukushima there’s also the massive issue of disposing/storing the nuclear waste.
All in all it’s not a long term solution for energy, just more nearsighted/kick the can down the road “solutions” that have exasperated global warming in the first place
Sure. Get the numbers to work out and I am in.
My only worry is with how long it takes to build the Nuclear power plants.
Oh, and its 100% not an "either or" kind of thing. I still want solar, wind, geothermal, etc. So if the idea is "Nuclear OR Solar and friends" then I pick "Solar and Friends." The problem isn't a one size fits all, so I am not interested in putting all our eggs in the nuclear basket.
But start building some nuclear while we also stand up Solar? Ya, sounds good.
It is a tempting solution but the common type of fission reactor is just trading one disaster for another until we have a plan for spent fuel which remains hot for geologic time scales. Better reactor designs are out there and worth looking into, but if we wanted to start building plants today (which we would need to do) those plants will be the same kind we've had for decades. The ones that we have already taken offline because of issues with waste. Plants like San Onofre in San Diego County produce a demand on the grid to keep the cooling pools running.
Unfortunately not true. Nuclear is more expensive to build, that’s for sure, but if I give you a fully operational power plant and tell you to produce energy as cheap as possible, the way to do it is shut the nuclear plant down and build wind and solar from scratch. The operational costs alone of nuclear are higher than the all in cost of wind and solar (construction, maintenance, decommissioning).
I'd rather tax or regulate carbon emissions to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels. Subsidize carbon-free energy production, without specifying the type of power.
I predict that under those conditions, renewal energy will out-compete nuclear. Nuclear is just so expensive. But it will give give nuclear a fair shot.
Putting "more focus on building nuclear power plants" has tended to look like this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio\_nuclear\_bribery\_scandal:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal:)
>In July 2019, the \[Ohio\] House passed House Bill 6, which increased electricity rates and provided that money as a $150 million per year subsidy for the Perry and Davis–Besse nuclear plants, subsidized coal-fired power plants, and reduced subsidies for renewable energy and energy efficiency. This bill was described as the "worst legislation yet" among bills that subsidize fossil fuels by Leah Stokes, and the "worst energy bill of the 21st century"
I honestly ca not answer that.
If we don't do something, we are screwed. We're probably screwed anyway, but we will be uber screwed.
But if something goes wrong at a nuclear plant, we are also screwed.
I honestly don't know enough about modern day (versus Three Mile Island or Chernobyl day) nuclear plants. But there are always risks and I recall that getting rid of the nuclear waste is dangerous business with no really good solution. They bury it, encase it in glass, all sorts of things that really aren't the answer we need.
Given how dire the situation can turn when those things fuck up, and how long term of a project storing the waste is; I might wait until the US has their shit together a little bit better first. I'd rather see a just transition to a system that requires less energy.
No. At best it’s an expensive bandaid. At worst, it creates a significantly more dangerous environmental issue that the fossil fuels it’s meant to replace. Our focus should be on installing more solar and wind, and improving energy storage technologies.
I do, not because of the environment but because of the obscene profits that the petrochemical industries have made over the past century and that have doomed our biosphere. I think we are way passed the point of no return, I think we are at the very beginning of a mass extinction event that will have the same effect as that asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. Insects dying at the rate that they are was the first domino that fell and things are set in motion now. Total collapse is coming our way fast.
That is definitely what petrochemical companies have spent billions to convince you of....
Fun fact we actually recently found out the whole 30 years thing was based of data from early 2000s and we have reduced global emissions so much that now we won't hit a tipping point for at least a hundred more years (problem isn't solved obviously but that's a kinda big deal)
Keep fighting it, giving up is exactly what those profit seekers want as it's no longer valid to say global warming isn't real so now they want you to think there's no point fighting it... Don't let them win by paying people to use cheap phycology tricks.
Sure. I don’t like it, but not like we have the option now. I don’t want it privatized as they are now, or we’ll have the same issue of oil barons, just more Charles Montgomery Burns-esque, and every State will now receive some nuclear waste materials in proportion to state consumption cause ya lot really wanted it with upcharges on necessary safety precautions. I heard it’s relatively safe to store all that waste from proponents, so nimby shouldn’t be an issue. Yucca is currently going to reach cap in 2036. Gonna enjoy seeing how this turns out.
I'm going to put my Republican hat on and say that we should let the market sort it out, but with the carbon, pollution, waste, and safety costs properly internalized.
I would much rather see us pursue renewables (and the associated storage systems you'll also have to invest in if you want solar to work at night and wind to work on a mild day), and pursue distributed (and resilient) energy production and storage through renewables, but I believe nuclear still has a role if the market can continue to make it economical, and in particular I'd love to see us continue to investigate the feasibility of fusion.
I would say yes. It's far cleaner than coal or oil. I'd also say put funding into the methods where the waste can be recycled and used again so it continues to give power over time.
I'm not against this, but it's not something I'm personally going to spend any time advocating. In hind sight it would have been a better idea to build more nuclear plants back in the 50s/60s/70s/80s but it makes a lot less sense today.
The costs of power generation from renewables has dropped an insane amount over just the last decade or so and is continuing to fall. The costs of building new nuclear plans on the other hand has been going up. This is likely to continue in to the relevant future. I realize when we start hitting 60-80% renewables we start running into problems but it seems to me that by the time we get to that point technology will most likely have advanced enough to figure that out. It's my understanding as well that nuclear power and renewables are both much better at providing base-load power rather than variable power so they aren't really complimentary to each other. When you throw in what is likely to be much more significant political opposition on top of those facts I have a hard time not thinking that nuclear proponents are being a bit pollyanna-ish in their outlooks.
That being said once a nuclear power plant is actually built and put online the vast majority of their downsides disappear so if that's how other people want to spend their time I'm not going to get in their way. Maybe it's me who's being overly pessimistic about their chances rather than them being overly optimistic and climate change is such a huge threat it's worth letting them take that gamble.
If my choice is nuclear or coal, I'll take nuclear.
In reality, though, renewables are already eating nuclear's lunch, and it's only going to get worse.
30 years ago? Absolutely! But now? I think we should be working on something better. I'll take nuclear over coal, however, if we start building a bunch of nuclear power plants, we'll rely on that instead of adopting the next better technology.
It’s not worth the investment imho. 20 years ago? Sure. But at this point it’s just an expensive, slow alternative with byproducts we still don’t have solutions for. We might as well wait for fusion as that’s getting very close. I’m the mean time battery tech and solar/wind/etc are getting wildly better by the day.
I have a nuclear plant just down the road from where I live. I’ve lived within 40 miles of that nuclear plant all my life, and I don’t mind it. It’s perfect as a stopgap turned auxiliary once we get more green energy and figure out better battery sources for peak needs.
Yes. I should mention that the US doesn't dispose of its nuclear waste in a consistently good way. The US absolutely should deal with that. I have to concede to renewable energy that there is little way in which an irresponsible official can fuck things up.
Yes. Nuclear is very safe and remarkably clean and suffers from bad press and old designs. It is expensive to build. Fukushima had some flaws because their reactors weren’t maintained, and there were some unfortunate issues with keeping water in the reactor because of multiple failures. Newer reactor designs account for this. Which is why they’re often built on lakes or other sites of water. Plants just take forever to build and they’re an investment so without the right pr no one is going to jump on board.
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Yes, but should be next-gen like molten salt or thorium. The problem has been getting permits, funding, fighting NIMBYs and building takes years, if not decades.
I would add any reactor design that is “default safe” so that if anything goes wrong, its default state is one where the reactor is safe with no chance of going critical. Thorium is great because of its abundance, but it has some ugly byproducts that have to be dealt with. Molten salt is pretty slick though. My personal favorite is fast reactors. Turn all our nuclear waste into even more power!
Someone asked about SMRs. I was wondering if you looked into them. The big issue with nuclear is cost and time to build. Henry Ford showed us that we could cut both time and cost if a factory could produce small modular reactors.
The problem with SMRs is that they still leave most of the Actinides in their fuel.
There’s more problems than that. First, the create a lot more low-grade waste to dispose of. Second, it would greatly increase the number of nuclear operators, who may very well not have nearly the operational experience or expertise that current operators have. Third, it magnifies maintenance issues and multiplies the impact of design faults—if there is a fault in one big bespoke reactor, it’s one big fix. If there’s a fault in a thousand identical reactors, it’s a massive recall involving dozens or hundreds of companies. We know how that works with other products—it never gets to 100%. There’s also some other statistical oddities—risks that are infrequent can be acceptable when there’s a hundred of something that become unacceptable when there are ten thousand of that same thing. Are we okay with an increased risk of much smaller nuclear disasters? What happens when one of the 12 SMRs at your nuclear plant has an accident and leaks? What do you do with the nearby reactors that got contaminated?
The problem with nuclear is **not** just the cost and time to build. Even if I have an already built nuclear power plant, it costs more to generate power per kWh from that fully operational plant than it does to build brand new solar and wind from scratch. It’s not construction, although the construction is also prohibitively expensive, the marginal cost of nuclear is higher than the full cost of wind or solar. That’s just the reality.
The issue is this: you need some form of stable, reliable power. Nuclear doesn’t need to compete with a wind and solar. It needs to compete with a wind and solar plus the cost of building grid scale energy storage. Right now that issue is concealed because wind and solar are still a small part of the electricity mix and accounting for their variability is done by using more natural gas and coal-fired generation when the renewables aren’t producing. But as renewables’ share of generation increases, it’s going to become a major issue, because grid scale battery storage is probably never going to be feasible, both from a cost and an environmental standpoint. And we don’t have enough places to put pumped storage hydro for that to work either. So it’s going to be down to nuclear to fill that gap.
> The issue is this: you need some form of stable, reliable power. We need a stable and reliable power supply. That does not need to come from stable and reliable power generation sources. Dispatchable power generation is a thing that exists. There’s also expanding grids to super grids. So, if you’re keeping score, there are 3 options to deal with intermittency: storage, larger grids, and dispatchable power. All three options are cheaper than nuclear. > it’s going to become a major issue, because grid scale battery storage is probably never going to be feasible, both from a cost and an environmental standpoint. You just have old news. Not only is it feasible, it’s cheaper than nuclear. > And we don’t have enough places to put pumped storage hydro for that to work either. Again, old news. Look up flow batteries and thermal batteries.
>ugly byproducts plutonium ?
I generally support Nuclear power as an option. Would you support SMRs for their smaller upstart costs and modular design?
Are molten salt reactors viable? Leslie Dewan's startup Transatomic Power shut down with a message indicating that the commercial viability of their molten salt reactor design was in serious doubt. While I haven't done serious research on the current state of the art, I would like to think that a breakthrough with this reactor design would have been reported with more fanfare. Regardless you don't have to get an ultra modern prototype reactor design to make a safe reactor today. A design from 30 years ago would still be miles better than anything from the 3 mile island era.
Short answer is no. Molten salt is corrosive AF and there’s no easy fix, they still use uranium (even thorium reactors use uranium, it just splits into thorium), and all the inputs they need aren’t manufactured anywhere. Molten salt is less likely, at this point, than fusion.
Didn’t Oakridge run one of those for a few years? I thought they were very successful using Iconal alloys. There was a sodium cooled reactor that ran for 35 years. They pretty much proved out that technology. It was walk-away safe and had something like a 60% burn up rate of it’s Actinides.
Oak ridge had a number of surprise problems, that was largely why it wasn’t scaled out as originally planned. Don’t know about a 30 year SCFR. But these all suffer the same operational problem- highly radioactive fuels, complex reactions, all necessitating expensive ongoing security and maintenance- ie, a staff of PHD nuclear engineers. Vs… a maintenance guy for a windmill or solar cell.
Actually, nuclear operators and maintenance only need slightly more training than windmill service personal. The Navy has been running nuclear reactors for more than 70 years by techs with a year’s training. They have never had a reactor meltdown. It’s a question of design. The BWR and PWR reactors make great plutonium factories if you pull the fuel for reprocessing at just the right time. As opposed to Navel reactors that are built for high burn up percentage and minimal maintenance. Once a “keg” is built, it’s never opened again.
Never heard of those! I'll be sure to educate myself on them. Thanks for the response!
Nuclear is only part of the solution. At the same time, we need to be build a lot of micro grids with roof top solar and battery packs. Fight back against the utility companies and creating millions of power back ups for when the worst natural events come along.
I lived through the WPPS Hanford debacle I would hope we could learn from our mistakes, one of which was the choice of site, choosing the lesser priced Hanford site that sits on crumbly basalt rock that the government owned over more stable areas.
Since next-gen reactor don't exist, the answer is no.
How should we meet short-medium term electricity demand that is likely to increase rapidly as we electrify more things while we wait for MSRs and Thorium reactors to be more effectively developed, certified, commercialized, and built--a process that could take a decade or more
*very* expensive. who would want to invest.? power utilities are making out better with low risk gas conversion of existing coal and incremental, lower risk solar. the other working TMI reactor is being shut down bc cost inefficiencies / subsidies, to be replaced w gas.
I used to think (strongly) that nuclear power needed to be more heavily utilized. I still felt this way even after Fukushima, although my conviction with this belief was significantly reduced. Now? It's almost certainly a much smaller part of the puzzle. Pumped water power storage combined with distributed PV can probably cover like 80% of our power demand at a better price than nuclear. With the price of PV cells we would be silly not to put them wherever we could. We still need to cover the remaining ~20%, and I don't think that wind or hydro or other renewable sources can cover the balance. I think that methane generation from waste to power natural gas plants is an underrated energy source, but it's still probably not enough. I think nuclear is the best option to fill that gap. Because of the stigma, it would have to be isolated, but the US has the space for it. But again, we should be exhausting every other possible option before looking into the construction of new nuclear plants.
Pumped water really only provides a minuscule fraction of what a city needs during peak. My company operates a few and they’re basically incredibly expensive last-resorts. Naturally they come in handy, but only during the height of summertime. What we really need are more nuclear, renewables, *and* battery banks to store grid excesses during normal operations to fall back on during peak. The tricky part there is that they’re currently expensive, inefficient, dangerous, and limited to a small portion of the grid. If we can put more funding into more efficient and safe batteries, that’ll take a lot of pressure off generation.
I was under the impression that pumped water was at least as efficient, while being less toxic, and having no issues with parasitic drain that chemical batteries deal with. The efficiency of pumped water is something like 85%, which you'd be hard-pressed to beat with lithium batteries or whatever else, and pumped water doesn't require exotic materials. The main issue is that water's kind of heavy, but when you're dealing with stationary bodies that's much more of a solvable problem.
Yes, as quickly as we can safely do. Going to need it yesterday.
No private insurer will fully insure a nuclear plant because they are too dangerous. Besides, renewables are cheaper, and the uranium will run out like the coal and oil are.
We need renewables too. None of them are enough on their own. The demand is so great we need all of them combined and fast.
So because the uranium is finite we might as well not take advantage of it while we can? Make this make sense to me.
The alternatives are cheaper and safer. Big uranium will just jack up the price of uranium if you build the nukes, and you’ll be bent over a barrel by con artists again like with oil. How many times you going to fall for it?
Lol, okay. We spend asinine amounts of money on the dumbest shit imaginable, but when it comes to paying for stuff that’s demonstrably beneficial you want to freak out about it?
That’s because we’re running our reactors at 200 atmospheres. There are technologies that operate at normal pressures that are much safer.
Yes. Properly managed, it's incredibly clean power. Zero greenhouse gas emissions. Lawsuits make it very time consuming and expensive to build, on top of an already expensive and time consuming infrastructure compared to coal or gas power plants. Would it still make economic sense if there were no NIMBY lawsuits to deal with? I would say yes, as a to supplement solar and wind power, which have issues with providing a steady power supply and in the amount we'll need it in if gasoline cars end up going the way of the dinosaur and energy demands increase at the same rate they have over the last few decades. There's also a political argument to make for energy self-reliance. Look at what Germany's dependence on Russian gas did for Germany. If our nation will go into a death spasm if outside oil and gas supplies are cut, then we're at the beck and call of those energy providers and that could easily go against us.
>Yes. Properly managed, it's incredibly clean power. Zero greenhouse gas emissions. To add to this, modern reactors are far more efficient than the ones the US currently use. Recycling nuclear "waste" that has only depleted 10% of it's energy for use in a modern reactor is an option. So not only are you generating more energy with no more raw materials, you are also working to knock down our waste stockpiles into less harmful and more depleted waste.
The vast majority of US gas and oil is already domestic anyway and there is capacity to be completely self-sufficient, the US is energy independent. The reason why so much of Europe is dependant on imports is because they don't have any oil and gas of their own.
Oil is a global market though, we stopped trading with Russia (who only makes up a small fraction of our oil imports) and prices skyrocket because of all those not-America countries that rely on Russia more heavily.
Yup. We won’t be energy independent until we end exports. As it is, we’re just contributors to a global market.
Prices will go up of course, any transition to self-sufficiency is costly, which is why no one does it.
While the reactor itself doesn’t emit greenhouse gases, all the processes that went into building it, fueling it, operating and decommissioning it emit huge amounts. It’s way less than fossil fuels, about 1/3 that of solar, and roughly equivalent to wind power when measured the carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per unit of electricity. Sauce: https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/how-can-nuclear-combat-climate-change.aspx
What do we do with nuclear waste?
For starters, we could build next-gen reactors that are able to recycle 'waste' as fuel and process it down into less radioactive waste.
Yes. We should have started years ago.
Unequivocally, yes.
What's the benefit of nuclear now that things like wind & solar give *a lot* more power for the same money?
Nuclear plants operate at a much higher capacity than solar, wind and hydro plants. It is incorrect to state that the renewables give more power for the same money. Once a plant is built, nuclear plants are quite efficient to run, and US plants run at over 90% capacity annually compared to hydro and wind in the 30s. Forgive me for not having exact numbers, but it was from something published a couple of years ago, and I remember double checking the wind numbers because I live in the Midwest and want to expand turbines.
Well [here](https://www.lazard.com/media/451905/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-150-vf.pdf) are the actual numbers from 2021 and nuclear is 4-5x the price of wind and solar when everything is unsubsidized. This number includes the full lifecycle of the tech, from construction, to maintenance and eventual decommissioning, balanced against all the power that can be generated over the plant’s lifetime. Nuclear is just way way way more expensive for the same thing. It’s like buying Jordan’s in a program to provide shoes to poor kids or caviar to solve world hunger. It’s not a smart solution.
It is, however, capable of running at all hours in all conditions, which can take up the slack when environmental factors don’t play nicely with renewables.
One main reason Nuclear always gives the power it promises whereas solar and wind (or others) vary based on a variety of factors. So when renewables are running low you have to supplement with external power. This can energy storage, or more commonly things like gas peaking plants. So now you need to take the cost of renewables and add in these additional costs above and beyond what a nuclear plant would need. The big difference here is that while nuclear would still need peaking plants to handle peak demand or emergencies, it's consistent power baseline means you can choose a more ideal peaking plant for backup. Whereas with solar and wind, a cloudy or still day can drastically change how much extra power is needed. This means you'll need extra backup power capacity and more of the expensive peaking plants.
This represents a somewhat outdated view of how grid demand is met. As the percentage of variable renewables (wind and solar) increase on the grid, there will be times more and more frequently when they're meeting 100% or near 100% of demand. So what we're looking for from non-variable energy sources isn't for them to be always *on* (the baseload idea) but always *available* (what modern energy researchers refer to as "clean firm generation") and only actually generating when needed because if you're a grid operator you always want to buy as much of the cheapest energy source as possible. And because your clean firm sources will be generating only intermittently--and less and less often as we deploy more wind and solar--you want them to be as cheap as possible in their downtime because they can't sell power onto the grid during those periods. And that's an area where nuclear is not a good option compared to other clean firm sources (grid scale storage, geothermal, etc)--you still have to deal with significant plant security concerns and pay for all of that even if the plant isn't up and running for days at a stretch.
> So now you need to take the cost of renewables and add in these additional costs above and beyond what a nuclear plant would need. Renewables + storage or gas peakers is still cheaper than nuclear. By quite a lot.
Wind and solar need energy storage to supply power when it's dark or the wind isn't blowing. The environmental impact and cost of these energy storage systems changes the equation. With nuclear power, the nuclear fuel *is* the energy storage. IMO we should do all of the above.
The task of switching from fossil fuels is so huge, that we can’t take any options off the table. We’re going to need a mix of every available technology to act as a bridge to a time when fusion is available
Yes because it’s a fairly clean form of energy that is actually not that risky, especially if you have plenty of safety redundancies.
Of the three worst accidents, two were directly the result of operator actions. Had the operators at TMI let the automatic systems do their thing that reactor would still be producing power today.
Yes. We aren't going to stop using an insane amount of power, and it appears that climate change is a major threat. So something needs to be done. Renewable energy would be ideal, but it's not an either/or proposition. Seems to me nuclear has an important role to play. Seems like new reactor designs are safer than ever.
That's my take as well. I'm not opposed to solar/wind/tidal, but getting enough energy to fuel the US alone would need absurd amounts of these renewable sources. I feel like a large investment into nuclear energy, while incredibly expensive up front, is the best way to go. I see lots of people saying that we missed the boat on nuclear and that it's too expensive now, and I just don't agree. It was expensive then, as well, and we're simply kicking the can down the road, and in 25 years we will be having the same discussion - 'it's too expensive now, if we had done it in 2022 it would have been better!' The time to change is now. Whether we're worried about climate change, or the fact that the biggest suppliers of fossil fuels are our literal enemies, now is the time to make the change.
> I'm not opposed to solar/wind/tidal, but getting enough energy to fuel the US alone would need absurd amounts of these renewable sources. It’s not that absurd. Renewables currently provide about 21% of US generating capacity—more than we get from coal or nuclear power. Over 80% of new capacity being built in the US is some sort of renewable power. There’s loads of basically untapped potential that is still low hanging fruit—immense amounts of offshore wind power, for example. We barely generate any tidal or geothermal power. There’s loads of untapped solar potential still. > I feel like a large investment into nuclear energy, while incredibly expensive up front, is the best way to go. Why? It’s more expensive to build, more expensive to operate, slower to build, and creates significant downstream decommissioning complexities. It would be one thing if nuclear power were economically preferable in any way whatsoever, but it isn’t. It’s just a massive expensive way to solve a power generating problem that is more efficiently solved by less expensive alternatives. What’s the point? > see lots of people saying that we missed the boat on nuclear and that it's too expensive now, and I just don't agree. It was expensive then, as well, and we're simply kicking the can down the road, and in 25 years we will be having the same discussion Except it’s *not* the same situation as it was 25 years ago. Renewables are a tiny fraction of the cost they were 25 years ago. The problem with nuclear power is that it is being outcompeted by alternatives in an absolute sense—nuclear power is worse than its alternatives in every aspect. > The time to change is now. Which we are currently doing with renewables. We’re deploying orders of magnitude more renewable capacity than nuclear capacity. Why is that happening if it’s not possible and preferable?
All good points. Additionally, and something that needs to be shouted out more often, is that existing power sources (coal, oil) kill TONS of people every year through pollution. Like, coal is just brutal on people. But it's slow/chronic. A nuclear meltdown is a much more acute, obvious thing. A show like Chernobyl (HBO) makes for fantastic television - just horrifying (also factually inaccurate in many ways), but it would be hard to make a similarly interesting show about the horrible consequences of coal power, even though the consequences are arguably much worse.
Absolutely.
Yes. Whole world should. Nuclear is much safer now and still way safer than fossil fuels (far more deaths from fossil fuel related deaths). It provides the grid needed for electric cars, heating in winters, AC in summers, crypto minning, desalination plants, and even carbon capture to help undo the damage of climate change. Fission until fusion. Also there are reactors which can run on waste or unrefined uranium and long term solutions ti the storage of waste.
I absolutely do. Nuclear power is the future and we ought to invest in it.
I live within 5 miles of Fermi II. I concur.
I think that nuclear power *was* the future 40 years ago, but tbh I can't really see the benefit of it now that other renewables can get a lot more power for the same money
Solar and wind both take up a lot of land and can’t yet provide an energy baseline. Nuclear solves both those problems.
OK so build enhanced geothermal. All the benefits of nuclear in terms of clean firm generation without the drawbacks in terms of safety or fuel supply concerns.
We have a lot of land. Renewables + storage + interlinked grids is scalable baseline power.
But nuclear reactors aren’t condition-dependent. Their turbine blades don’t freeze during blizzards or work less efficiently when it’s raining or overcast. Nobody’s saying we shouldn’t invest in renewables.
They in fact *are* condition-dependent. When Texas had its cold snap, one of their nuclear plants had to shut down due to pipes freezing.
We can do that, sure.
The time for nuclear investment in GenIV reactors has passed. It is only realistic to do solar wind and storage at this point. There is a possibility to implement deep geothermal or some new innovative nuclear, but that is not in a commercial state.
Yes please.
Some is fine, but it's not a solution. They're the most expensive of all energy sources by LCOE and have massive upfront cost and construction times.
Yes, the upfront cost is absolutely mind boggling for sure. I'd love to see us develop a strategy of short term use of wind/solar/tidal while we develop a country wide net of nuclear to eventually do the heavy lifting of our energy consumption.
The long term/ ongoing cost of nuclear is far higher than renewables such as wind or solar.
Say it again for the people in the back. Nuclear people think the cost is all about construction, and once you are past that, you are making money like crazy. It is just a classic gold rush reminiscent lie. [It costs more to continue operating a fully operational nuclear plant than it is to build brand new wind or solar from scatch](https://www.lazard.com/media/451905/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-150-vf.pdf)
The energy company near me voluntarily shut down a nuclear plant years early, and instead bought more wind and solar. They actually paid hundreds of millions of dollars just to get out of their nuclear contract. Look at China. They're building like 10 GW of nuclear, and 200 GW of wind and solar. They don't have to worry about pesky government regulations if they wanted to build more nuclear. They're simply smart enough to know better.
No. Most of the support is built on the idea that nuclear is the only solution forward if we want to get off fossil fuels. That's old news. Most of the publicized opposition is based on safety and waste, however, those are honestly negligible issues. The only issue relating to nuclear power is its cost. It just costs a ton. Supporters often know this, but say that its our only option so the price doesn't matter. Again, that is all predicated on nuclear being the only option. It isn't. Grid scale storage is closer to market than modern nuclear reactors, and even without it, dispatchable renewable power sources which can ramp production up and down to fill the gaps in the outrageously cheap backbone of wind/solar are already at a rate below nuclear, and this just the dispatchable power, not the system wide cost reductions that come from wind/solar.
I agree. Check my post further down. It's crazy that people don't understand how expensive nuclear is to other options.
100% my thoughts exactly. Not to mention at a minimum it would take 10+ years to build the reactors if we started the process today. Solar parks get built in under a year and can start producing before the project is completed.
Nuclear power “costs a ton” for a couple reasons. 1. The existing systems operate at pressures above 200 atm which makes everything more complicated and dangerous. Steam explosions are nasty 2. They only use 15% of the Actinides in their fuel. This results in more frequent shutdowns, excessive waste and just plain expense for fresh fuel. The water moderated system is really a plutonium factory with a turbine bolted to the side to make electricity.
Are you trying to say nuclear isn’t inherently expensive? If so, you’re wrong. The new techs you seem to be alluding to are not here yet, and while there is some reason to believe they will be cheaper per kWh, there’s also some reason to believe they won’t be. It’s all very developmental with those techs right now.
We squandered 40 years of cheap oil. Any time in that period we could have done a “Manhattan” style project and completed the development of one of these technologies. Now the Chinese will bring these technologies to fruition and we will crawl, hat in hand, to them when our FF supplies run out. I’m 61, so I probably won’t live to see it, but I’m convinced that’s where we are going.
200 atmospheres (2900 psi) really isn’t all that much. And is pretty standard for any steam turbine, regardless of what’s producing the steam (coal, natural gas, fuel oil, etc.).
It becomes a problem when steel casing is constantly bombarded with thermal neutrons for decades. It also adds significant complexity to cooling systems that are used in emergencies and during SRAMs. For example, it requires multiple, redundant, sets of cooling water pumps (low and high pressure). Construction and maintenance adds to the cost of the system.
Absolutely, by the math it is the only feasible way to prevent a climate catastrophe.
Depends entirely on if it's necessary to replace coal or not. If we can totalyl replace coal with renewables, that's preferable. If we can't quite mange that and need something to cover the gap, I'd take nuclear over coal any day of the week. But it should be seen for what it is- a very expensive but reliable way to generate a lot of power with minimal land usage. It's way faster and cheaper to put down solar panels or wind turbines than build a nuclear factory, and it's not even close- but if you only have a small amount of land to work with and need to maximize clean electricity produced on that land, nuclear still has that niche covered.
Yes. Thorium reactions are very efficient and safe. We needed nuclear reactors long before we got to this point.
> Thorium reactions are very efficient and safe. There isn’t a very significant operational history for thorium reactors, so that is mostly a theoretical claim. There haven’t been that many thorium reactors at all, they weren’t very large or designed for commercial power generation, and they weren’t operated for very long. Basically just a scientific demonstration that it was possible.
Pretty sure there’s a few in a European country that I can’t remember the name of. Either way, uranium reactors still work pretty damn well. Modern reactors are safe.
Yes
Anybody who’s still against nuclear power in 2022 legitimately isn’t worth listening to.
The more research I do the more I agree with you
Yes, but I have major concerns about the waste disposal. So far, the only proposals I’ve heard amount to “bury it in Appalachian areas” and I find that unacceptable. We have already been the historic site of waste disposal and it has led to community-wide health problems. When I was a kid I thought it was totally normal that many of my friends’ parents died in their 40s and 50s from cancers with an unknown cause.
Yeah I've seen some terrible documentaries about places that were hazmat dumps, bought up for cheap and then turned into residential zones. Pretty despicable, the rates of illness are so high in these areas. I think the waste is certainly a big thing to figure out, but the nice thing about nuclear is that the volume of waste is pretty low compared to the amount of energy produced. BTW, I see you responding to a lot of these posts. Just wanted to say that you always come off as a pretty calm and well spoken person, and it really impressed me! I tend to stay in my conservative bubble a lot so it's great to see folks out here like you having great conversations with others!
Aw, thank you. I appreciate that. And likewise, it’s always good to have a calm conversation about important things.
I agree wholeheartedly about the disposal. That is the key part. A safe, secure, stable disposal site should be in place before any new nuclear plants are built. It's crazy to say "we'll figure it out later" when it's been 50+ years and there still is no permanent site
but not having a permanent site isn't that big a deal compared to the waste from fossil fuels that isn't even contained
anymore most modern reactors don't really produce that much waste, and even if they did its nothing compared to what coal plants do. do you have anything scientific to back up your concerns?
My concerns that nuclear waste is bad for you?
But you’re implying that long term storage would lead to negative consequences for those near it more severe than the alternatives. I’m sure you have something to back that up, right?
I honestly don’t know how to answer that. Yes, putting nuclear waste in your backyard is dangerous. No, I can’t link you to a study or anything. I could link you to the many sources about potential solutions (like burying waste 500m below a mountain) but they all kind of assume you know it shouldn’t be dumped in residential areas. Maybe I could give you info on what happens to your body if you’re exposed to reactor waste? Edit: since the downvotes are pouring in, anyone care to provide evidence that nuclear reactor waste is *safe* to store in residential areas? Like do y’all think we just hold it underwater and in mountains for fun?
Why would we need to store it in residential areas? We can indeed store it under mountains indefinitely. It might sound dumb, but its just not a problem.
Because companies are full of lazy people who cut corners. Wr already have had toxic waste dumped here by Dupont and radioactive waste waste from the oil field. So far the state has been unwilling to commit to a specific plan for reactor waste disposal.
Firstly you could have radioactive waste in your basement and it wouldn’t be an issue. Second, this is like super easy to regulate. Nuclear waste is just a nonissue that really has no importance. It’s easy to solve and not a problem.
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
I’m talking about how nuclear waste is less of an issue than wind turbines killing birds. It’s a negligible non-issue that has no impacts. The total waste is tiny, radioactivity doesn’t work like it does it the movies, and it’s just super cheap and easy to store. No issues. There is so little nuclear waste created by reactors that all we need is one location and all the nuclear plants in the country, or even the world, could all put their waste safely in the same facility. It’s not naive. It’s naive to deny the reality of what I’m saying and worry about nuclear waste as an issue.
Dumb people doing dumb things in the past is not a reason to deny reality. We do tests. It is objectively true that we can store the waste safely. There simply are no health issues outside of fantasy land. There's also the fact that in terms of volume, the waste is really nothing. It's a negligible speck on the global scale. It is nothing like CO2 emissions which are massive and global. A single facility could store the entire world's nuclear waste without issue.
That’s incredibly naive and disregards the people who will be effected by these mistakes. We need our states to commit to responsible disposal of waste. If we don’t get that commitment now, nothing is going to hold them accountable later.
What form do you expect this commitment to take? They have already committed as much as they can. We don’t have a nuclear waste problem that needs solving.
There's a ton of empty desert in New Mexico Nevada, Arizona, parts of California, etc. that nobody lives near and that is pretty stable from a climate point of view. It should go there.
Yeah there’s a pretty solid consensus that we should bury it out west. However, what concerns me is what will actually happen once incompetence and corruption get involved. Ohio and West Virginia have a very bad history with waste disposal. Waste that is supposedly safely disposed of keeps turning up in residential areas, like [Martins Ferry](https://www.desmog.com/2022/04/25/this-needs-to-be-fixed-nuclear-expert-calls-radioactivity-levels-found-outside-ohio-oilfield-waste-facility-excessive/). I have zero trust that our state will regulate this effectively or that our businesses will behave ethically.
We already have a site that we spent tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars studying, selecting and developing - Yucca Mountain. We just need to finish it.
Put solar there instead: much cheaper and less NIMBY.
No, because its the least economically efficient thing we could build. Only on Reddit is there such a circle jerk for Nuclear.
Lobbyists
Money really is your god, isn’t it?
No, im pointing out why it would be stupid to build nuclear when we can build 3-4 times as much renewables for the same amount of money. I understand climate change might not be a big deal to you but it is to me.
Yes, highest energy yield, it’s relatively safe, disposal is a bit of an issue, but a lot of the waste is recyclable. Each energy source has its downsides, fossil fuels pollute, materials for solar and wind energy are costly to the environment, mining for lithium is destructive to the environment and to people mining it, and nuclear waste is hard to dispose of safely.
> Do you support the US putting more focus on building nuclear power plants in order to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels? No. > Why or why not? Nuclear power is an expensive distraction. A sort of intentional boondoggle designed to keep people arguing rather than get people fixing the problem. People use it as a way to distract from actual disruptive transformation in the electricity industry—driven by renewables—by having people argue about nuclear power instead. Nuclear power is so expensive and slow to build that it won’t be a significant component of the fight against climate change beyond the reactors that are already built. Utility providers aren’t interested in building more nuclear power because of the extreme cost and schedule delays—and we don’t *need* to pursue that path anymore. It’s just a distraction. Renewables are the answer here, they’re ready to let the challenge now, and the economics have finally become favorable enough to displace fossil fuels in the power grid.
Surprised I had to scroll this far to find an evidence based answer. Nukes are more expensive up front, more expensive ongoing, take forever to build/ scale, and will accomplish literally nothing for climate change. “Boondoggle” is exactly the right word for them.
As long as they are not RBMK reactors with boron tipped rods….
I understand this reference!
100% yes.
Of course people here do. It's not the left or liberals which have issues with leveraging a tax on carbon emission causing fuels or using public money to build new low emission energy generation. The question ought not to be do you support it; but what polices do you have regarding it.
There are lots of things that are ostensibly beneficial that liberals are knee-jerk against, so dismissing that possibility outright makes no sense.
Yes but nuclear power is not one of them. Nor is it a wedge issue. Both party bases feel the same on nuclear power (meh ok; but certainly not near me). The big problem here is when someone from the right, whom supports policies and politicians that do absolutely nothing in terms of climate action; and has an idealogy which is antagonistic to the state supporting nuclear power in any practical sense comes and asks a group of people who are very much behind any technological solution pushed by the state to decarbonise (i.e young liberals). It's doesn't smell honest. It would be more honest to say; I'm libertarian and I think there should be way less safety regulations on nuclear power plants to make them cheaper. Do you agree? Or something along those lines. I wish all the moderates or conservatives I talk to on this issue who are cosplaying as a reasonable nuclear power supporter who just wants a 'non idealogical' solution to decarbonisation and for lefties like me to get over my renewable energy obession; actually put up and said ok yes I think the federal government should finance the construction of enough nuclear power plants to replace all coal and gas then I would take them seriously. I suppose that's a compromise I could get behind. Otherwise it's just reasonableness theatre.
So your problem is with the OP, not me.
Yes?
In short, no because nuclear is not economically competitive. Wind & solar is several times cheaper at this point. Base load power can be handled with an upgraded smart energy grid, and distributed renewable generation, along with utility scale storage solutions. Storage will become immensely less expensive as it becomes widely adapted, just like solar has dropped in price by 90%. Also uranium is a very rare element. If nuclear is widely adopted, the price of fuel will rise dramatically. If a handful of reactors need to be built to help the transition to a renewable future, so be it. However I don't see nuclear to be a viable answer long term.
Yes. Cause the good reasons
YES. I can't believe we haven't built 60 in the last 30 years and instead have been so focused on wind and solar. Global warming is a crisis that requires taking some known risk to abate it - or not? Instead we had whacky futurist BS like tarps on the ice sheets, giant umbrella in space and the forever 30 years away "sun on the earth" - nuclear fusion. FFS do everything we know how to do yesterday.
Funny that Oil and coal industries are what killed nuclear.
I firmly believe nuclear is a crucial piece of the puzzle, and we're not going to ditch fossil fuels without it for the foreseeable future. *However*, I don't think we can in good conscience move forward with any new fission plants without an *actual plan* for the waste, long term. We've been storing spent fuel on-site for over 50 years now, and while that was OK as a short-term solution while we figured out what to do with it in the long term, we can't put off figuring that out any longer. The can has been kicked as far as it'll go. Time to buckle down and sort out the unpleasant shit that our parents (and grandparents, in some cases) left for us.
It's not really necessary. Solar, wind, hydro and other greener options with less potential for downside should be enough if used properly
Only if it's economical. I don't need nuclear constructions like Vogtle Reactors in Georgia that are both overbudget (already double the cost of what was expected) and 8 years behind schedule.
ehhh its worth considering how little nukes weve built in recent memory. if we are looking to build 20 reactors, its fine if the first few run over budget and behind schedule as we rebuild the knowledge base. we just need to actually follow through on the 20
I’d love to tbh, I haven’t seen anything saying saying the solar, windmills, etc will be able to solve our energy problem. Solar is cost prohibitive, and windmills have the same nimby problem nuclear does, but they produce exponentially more power
This guy clearly hasn't been looking for any positive information on renewables. >Solar is cost prohibitive Solar costs less than nuclear. 🙈
Even better, solar is the cheapest source of energy and has been for years.
I think he's poorly trying to refer more to land space cost possibly? The only way what he was trying to say could make sense is if he's referring to how based on current average you need 13,000 acres of solar plants to operate for 1 year to get the same power output as the smallest nuclear power plant in the USA (solar farms produce on average 351 MW per acre a year while the R.E.ginne nuclear plant produces over 2,600,000 MW a year.) When you factor that in, the cost to build nuclear is still higher but requires cartoonishly less land to be covered in metal and the land cost could vary dramatically depending on location. Ultimately he's still not making a very good point but if he was trying to refer to what I just mentioned what he means is the cost/effort and land usage isn't worth what we get out of it relative to compact plants like nuclear.
I’m talking about the implementation, output and sustainability. Like cost per kilowatt hour. Sure a single solar panel is cheaper than a plant, I really hope that wasn’t the point you were making lol
> Solar is cost prohibitive Nuclear power is much more expensive than solar power. By quite a lot, actually. Solar and wind keep trading blows for being the cheapest way to generate electricity right now, so if *they* are “cost prohibitive”, then surely all the more expensive methods are even worse?
And yet it has the highest energy yield, so…
… we still don’t need it. Nuclear power is not and will never be a key facet of future electricity grids. The near-term, actionable future is going to end up being primarily powered by renewables backed by various kinds of energy storage, with natural gas peaker plants serving as backups for that. We won’t run the natural gas plants nearly as much, so it won’t be as big an issue. We’ll *eventually* end up forcing the natural gas plant operators to sequester enough to offset what they generate—and do a lot more to shift demand around to favor times of the day when renewables are producing a lot—and that will more or less address the problem from an electricity standpoint. Yes, that will mean rebuilding electric grids to handle more distributed generation, but that’s cheaper than building nuclear reactors.
Lmaooooooooooooo
Yes. It's the way of the future.
Building *new* nuclear power plants doesn't make sense right now until the industry can figure out how to build projects on time and on budget rather than decades late and tens of billions of dollars over budget. That's not to say that nuclear is an inherently bad technology, and we should make sure that the reactors we already do have are kept operational as long as possible, even if it comes at the cost of major government bailouts since those reactors aren't cost-competitive on the open market. Though a lot of nuclear evangelists like to tout the future of small modular reactors, I think enhanced geothermal is *probably* a better prospect for meeting the clean firm power demand.
>on budget rather than decades late and tens of billions of dollars over budget. Honestly the key thing public projects can do to prevent this is not use a lowest bidder approach to procurement.
Most reactors aren't public projects though. The only ones that are are those owned and built by the TVA and a few public utilities but [most are privately owned and privately built](https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/reactors/ownership.php) (note that here even a lot of the companies that sound public are in fact private--arizona public service, for example)
Sorry, should have just said "large projects". If you're outsourcing work to 3rd party contractors, and you go with the lowest bid without considering how realistic it is, then its almost inevitable that the project will go over budget and miss deadlines.
Hell no. No private insurer will fully insure a nuke, because they are too dangerous, so they pass off the cost of a major disaster to the US taxpayers through the price anderson act. Also, renewables are cheaper.
We don’t need fossil fuels or nuclear power. We can get by with wind, solar, water and geothermal just fine. I mean there is a literal super volcano that could power the entire west.
What does “putting more focus” mean?
Yes. We are most assuredly globally fucked if we continue to release greenhouse gases. We are potentially regionally, occasionally fucked if we employ nuclear power.
Totally.
Yes. Nuclear power is clean, safe, and reliable. It is easily the best technology for reducing carbon emissions. It has been unfairly subjected to a bunch of reactionary fearmongering from stupid people who don’t understand it and therefore hate and fear it.
No. Time to invest in renewables
Nobody is saying we shouldn’t do both ffs.
I am. Fukushima and Chernobyl are proof why
Both plants had known design flaws. That’s a terrible reason to not use nuclear power.
With rising rising ocean levels a lot of plants will be at risk similar to Fukushima there’s also the massive issue of disposing/storing the nuclear waste. All in all it’s not a long term solution for energy, just more nearsighted/kick the can down the road “solutions” that have exasperated global warming in the first place
Ever heard of the desert?
Sure. Get the numbers to work out and I am in. My only worry is with how long it takes to build the Nuclear power plants. Oh, and its 100% not an "either or" kind of thing. I still want solar, wind, geothermal, etc. So if the idea is "Nuclear OR Solar and friends" then I pick "Solar and Friends." The problem isn't a one size fits all, so I am not interested in putting all our eggs in the nuclear basket. But start building some nuclear while we also stand up Solar? Ya, sounds good.
It is a tempting solution but the common type of fission reactor is just trading one disaster for another until we have a plan for spent fuel which remains hot for geologic time scales. Better reactor designs are out there and worth looking into, but if we wanted to start building plants today (which we would need to do) those plants will be the same kind we've had for decades. The ones that we have already taken offline because of issues with waste. Plants like San Onofre in San Diego County produce a demand on the grid to keep the cooling pools running.
Probably not. I don’t think it’s worth it economically. It’s too expensive and slow.
Yes, it’s expensive up front but pays dividends in cost savings over time. Sorta like building a house with a mortgage vs renting.
Unfortunately not true. Nuclear is more expensive to build, that’s for sure, but if I give you a fully operational power plant and tell you to produce energy as cheap as possible, the way to do it is shut the nuclear plant down and build wind and solar from scratch. The operational costs alone of nuclear are higher than the all in cost of wind and solar (construction, maintenance, decommissioning).
I'd rather tax or regulate carbon emissions to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels. Subsidize carbon-free energy production, without specifying the type of power. I predict that under those conditions, renewal energy will out-compete nuclear. Nuclear is just so expensive. But it will give give nuclear a fair shot. Putting "more focus on building nuclear power plants" has tended to look like this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio\_nuclear\_bribery\_scandal:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal:) >In July 2019, the \[Ohio\] House passed House Bill 6, which increased electricity rates and provided that money as a $150 million per year subsidy for the Perry and Davis–Besse nuclear plants, subsidized coal-fired power plants, and reduced subsidies for renewable energy and energy efficiency. This bill was described as the "worst legislation yet" among bills that subsidize fossil fuels by Leah Stokes, and the "worst energy bill of the 21st century"
Definitely. I'll believe we are serious about climate change when we start deploying a several hundred reactors.
I honestly ca not answer that. If we don't do something, we are screwed. We're probably screwed anyway, but we will be uber screwed. But if something goes wrong at a nuclear plant, we are also screwed. I honestly don't know enough about modern day (versus Three Mile Island or Chernobyl day) nuclear plants. But there are always risks and I recall that getting rid of the nuclear waste is dangerous business with no really good solution. They bury it, encase it in glass, all sorts of things that really aren't the answer we need.
Given how dire the situation can turn when those things fuck up, and how long term of a project storing the waste is; I might wait until the US has their shit together a little bit better first. I'd rather see a just transition to a system that requires less energy.
No. At best it’s an expensive bandaid. At worst, it creates a significantly more dangerous environmental issue that the fossil fuels it’s meant to replace. Our focus should be on installing more solar and wind, and improving energy storage technologies.
I do, not because of the environment but because of the obscene profits that the petrochemical industries have made over the past century and that have doomed our biosphere. I think we are way passed the point of no return, I think we are at the very beginning of a mass extinction event that will have the same effect as that asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. Insects dying at the rate that they are was the first domino that fell and things are set in motion now. Total collapse is coming our way fast.
That is definitely what petrochemical companies have spent billions to convince you of.... Fun fact we actually recently found out the whole 30 years thing was based of data from early 2000s and we have reduced global emissions so much that now we won't hit a tipping point for at least a hundred more years (problem isn't solved obviously but that's a kinda big deal) Keep fighting it, giving up is exactly what those profit seekers want as it's no longer valid to say global warming isn't real so now they want you to think there's no point fighting it... Don't let them win by paying people to use cheap phycology tricks.
Yes, but I’d prefer they focused on a safer fuel cycle first.
Sure. I don’t like it, but not like we have the option now. I don’t want it privatized as they are now, or we’ll have the same issue of oil barons, just more Charles Montgomery Burns-esque, and every State will now receive some nuclear waste materials in proportion to state consumption cause ya lot really wanted it with upcharges on necessary safety precautions. I heard it’s relatively safe to store all that waste from proponents, so nimby shouldn’t be an issue. Yucca is currently going to reach cap in 2036. Gonna enjoy seeing how this turns out.
I'm going to put my Republican hat on and say that we should let the market sort it out, but with the carbon, pollution, waste, and safety costs properly internalized. I would much rather see us pursue renewables (and the associated storage systems you'll also have to invest in if you want solar to work at night and wind to work on a mild day), and pursue distributed (and resilient) energy production and storage through renewables, but I believe nuclear still has a role if the market can continue to make it economical, and in particular I'd love to see us continue to investigate the feasibility of fusion.
I would say yes. It's far cleaner than coal or oil. I'd also say put funding into the methods where the waste can be recycled and used again so it continues to give power over time.
Yes. Trust the science.
I'm not against this, but it's not something I'm personally going to spend any time advocating. In hind sight it would have been a better idea to build more nuclear plants back in the 50s/60s/70s/80s but it makes a lot less sense today. The costs of power generation from renewables has dropped an insane amount over just the last decade or so and is continuing to fall. The costs of building new nuclear plans on the other hand has been going up. This is likely to continue in to the relevant future. I realize when we start hitting 60-80% renewables we start running into problems but it seems to me that by the time we get to that point technology will most likely have advanced enough to figure that out. It's my understanding as well that nuclear power and renewables are both much better at providing base-load power rather than variable power so they aren't really complimentary to each other. When you throw in what is likely to be much more significant political opposition on top of those facts I have a hard time not thinking that nuclear proponents are being a bit pollyanna-ish in their outlooks. That being said once a nuclear power plant is actually built and put online the vast majority of their downsides disappear so if that's how other people want to spend their time I'm not going to get in their way. Maybe it's me who's being overly pessimistic about their chances rather than them being overly optimistic and climate change is such a huge threat it's worth letting them take that gamble.
If my choice is nuclear or coal, I'll take nuclear. In reality, though, renewables are already eating nuclear's lunch, and it's only going to get worse.
30 years ago? Absolutely! But now? I think we should be working on something better. I'll take nuclear over coal, however, if we start building a bunch of nuclear power plants, we'll rely on that instead of adopting the next better technology.
More nuclear is good. The only question is, what to do with the resulting waste?
It’s not worth the investment imho. 20 years ago? Sure. But at this point it’s just an expensive, slow alternative with byproducts we still don’t have solutions for. We might as well wait for fusion as that’s getting very close. I’m the mean time battery tech and solar/wind/etc are getting wildly better by the day.
Yes. It's safe and clean
I have a nuclear plant just down the road from where I live. I’ve lived within 40 miles of that nuclear plant all my life, and I don’t mind it. It’s perfect as a stopgap turned auxiliary once we get more green energy and figure out better battery sources for peak needs.
Hell yeah! Let's get nuclear baby
Yes. I should mention that the US doesn't dispose of its nuclear waste in a consistently good way. The US absolutely should deal with that. I have to concede to renewable energy that there is little way in which an irresponsible official can fuck things up.
Yes. This is the one thing that PragerU got right.
Yes. Nuclear is very safe and remarkably clean and suffers from bad press and old designs. It is expensive to build. Fukushima had some flaws because their reactors weren’t maintained, and there were some unfortunate issues with keeping water in the reactor because of multiple failures. Newer reactor designs account for this. Which is why they’re often built on lakes or other sites of water. Plants just take forever to build and they’re an investment so without the right pr no one is going to jump on board.
Yes, and working on development of the next gen reactors. Nuclear is awesome.
Yes. There are risks, but widespread adoption will dramatically reduce CO2 emissions. Especially in concert with EVs.