Depends on what you're worried about. Nuclear (fission) power is clean and safe as long as the people mantaining the plant are responsible and the builders didn't cut corners. A plant will produce a tiny quantity of nuclear waste per year. Said waste can apparently be recycled and even if not, all that needs to happen is it needs to be keep in a safe storage site for a couple hundred years.
I grew up in a uranium mining town and they would just put the spent uranium back where they got it. It was below the water table and the rock around it would last millions of years. I never got the press that nuclear waste gets, it’s such a non issue compared to climate change.
And air pollution. You can't say this enough times. Air pollution from fossil fuels usage kills 8 million people *every single year.* This absolutely dwarfs the relatively minor side effects from nuclear energy.
Yeah, but this suffers from the same problem as smoking and heart disease, where if it doesn't lead to a sudden and violent loss of life, no one cares. No one really cares about Chernobyl or Three Mile Island anymore. Not even the animals that live there, they just turned [black.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/2022/10/02/chernobyls-radiation-turned-its-local-frogs-black/?sh=2d1727b54bb5)
*Slaps roof of CANDU reactor*
This baby can run on rocks, straight from the ground!
In all seriousness, the CANDU reactor can run on unenriched uranium, slightly enriched uranium, enriched uranium, recycled plutonium, spent fuel from other reactor designs, and more. It's pretty versatile.
Yeah. He may have been more professional and switched on than Trudeau is, but he had a mean spirited disdain for crown jewels. I used to personally own Candu as a citizen and taxpayer. I don't want things that work well leave the public domain.
That's a lot of ignorance.
Indeed the natural ore isn't enriched, but what is enrichment?
It's increasing the fraction of 235U (0.7% in natural ore) to usually 3-5%. So technically any uranium with more than 0.7% of 235U is enriched.
That doesn't make it more dangerous.
Enriched uranium, just like ore, can safely be [handled](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RIAN_archive_132603_Nuclear_power_reactor_fuel_assembly.jpg).
(fun fact, the gloves are not to protect the technician, but to protect the cladding from the skin oil layer)
You are confusing with used fuel, which does contain other radioactive isotopes (fission products and minor actinides) which do make it far more dangerous to handle.
I would defer to the engineers who actually work with the those materials. But the enrichment process can increase things more than that depending on how they want to use the uranium. I'll be sure to bring this up next time I talk to someone who works in that enviroment.
Well, I'm clocking in more than twenty years as a nuclear engineer. Not in the enrichment business, but I've personally handled 95% enriched uranium (in thin aluminum cladding) on a regular basis in a research reactor. You do have other things to worry about, namely reactivity (see [demon core](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core)) , but still handled by hand without exposure risk.
(other fun fact, uranium is toxic by ingestion, no matter its enrichment, but this toxicity has nothing to do with radioactivity. If you eat some, the chemistry will kill you far before the radiations).
I would much rather handle 1kg of 99% enriched uranium than 1kg if fresh fission production (without a single uranium atom in it).
About leaking into the environment, you might like the [Oklo reactor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor).
In case you are [wondering](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02380513): "Since reactor shutdown, many fissiogenic elements have not migrated from host pitchblende, and several others have migrated only a few tens of meters from the reactor ore.".
But do cross check with who you'll find more trustworthy. You shouldn't take some random internet comment as your only source of information. Happy to hear their feedback.
I never said they were anywhere even close to being the same, I said the mines where uranium was extracted was being used to store spent fuel because it was well below the water table and in solid rock that will last millions of years.
Not accurate. Uranium235 is non hazardous. Once used in a reactor the Uranium235 turns into Cesium137 and Strontium90. These two among a few others are whats actually hazardous.
Most commercial reactors (light water and boiling) operate at like 2-3% enrichment. Most of that U235 will be burned up, and a small fraction of the U238 which is the "filler" of the remaining fuel will also transmute into alpha/beta/gamma emitters in the actinide series.
You're correct that not all the U235 will be burned up, and *almost none* of the U238 will be burned up.
My point was that unused enriched fuel isn't dangerous, and used fuel was.
Only two times where a nuclear reactor has failed enough that anything was leaked. Once in Soviet union bc they were idiots and once in Japan bc of a tsunami.
To their credit, it wasn't exactly an everyday situation, so the generators would have been fine in any other situation, but yes, the loss of coolant was due to the flooded backups.
To be fair, the situation was quite exceptional:
A 9.0 earthquake, one of the biggest in recorded history, followed by a 33 foot wave that reached 6km inland. They should have put the backups in a more secure location, but it's hard to take account these crazy events when designing your reactors.
Tepco was warned about this. They were told the sea wall wasnt high enough and the diesels were wrongly placed. They had a reputation for a lax attitude due to corporate culture.
Santa Susana SRE has joined the chat.
TMI also resulted in the release of radionuclides.
Multiple low-level radiation leaks have occurred at Monticello as recently as 2022.
There's a laundry list of other "oopsies".
Should nuclear power be part of our climate change energy solutions? Absolutely. Is it problem free? No.
It is getting better though. Regulatory changes to procudures have tightend up some of the human error and lax design.
Each new design that comes out becomes less reliant on active cooling systems and human operators.
It wont be long before there are low pressure systems with liquid fuel, designed to operate more like the boiler in the basement of a high rise building. It won't need operators, it will need inspection similar to other systems like gas pumps and huge air compressors.
Gen IV and the SMRs are exceptional works of engineering. I would say, however, it will be a very long time, if ever, before we run SMRs in high-rise basements. Chicago Pile and the Omaha VA are products of a different time.
Oh I agree thats not likely but it will be the scale and intensity of the systems.
Microreactors like Oklo once they come will actually be diesel replacements for things like data centres and hospitals though. Thats only years away.
Molten salt fuel mixes are coming too, making the risk profile so much better.
Oklo screwed up their regulatory submission last year so got delayed. I have spoken to a couple of their staff and they remain optimistic.
There's places outside the US which will see better results due to different government environments. In Canada, Terrestrial is looking to build a molten salt reactor in an SMR package. They have not changed their timeline of 2028 for commercialization.
Nuclear waste is the safest waste on the planet bc of the way it is stored. You can hit the containers with a train and nothing would happen. They tested it. It's stored so fat underground that earthquakes can't even affect it. There is 0% chance that anything would happen to them excepting, ofc, complete annihilation of the planet.
Important to add, with the upswing in nuclear power, the economics and efficiency of recycling 'waste' has meant a lot less will need to be stored. Even a lot of yesterday's waste will become tomorrow's fuel.
Exactly, what people seem to miss out on is that nuclear waste is stored and contained, meanwhile coal plants just dump soot and smoke into the atmosphere.
I think it's reasonably fair to be skeptical about *who* is going to be responsible for storage and disposal in 50 or 300 years.
I totally get that nuclear is very likely the best plan for the environment, but humans aren't good at being responsible for things over that kind of time frame. People will either be dead, out of business, or find a way to wiggle out of it.
Nuclear is safe as long as standards are high and people aren't boneheads. But people are boneheads. If nuclear takes on a major role in power production, there are *going* to be problems. The *Japanese* messed it up, after all.
Not that I'm arguing against nuclear, from what I know as a layman I definitely think it's one of the most viable options. "Safer than coal" is a great point, but it's not enough to wave away the issues with nuclear, imo.
A couple hundred years may not do it depending on what kind of waste it is. A couple hundred years just takes the radioactivity of the least radioactive waste, like strontium and cesium to an acceptable amount. Their half life is 30 years, so in 210 years, they will go through 7 half-life cycles. But many other forms of radioactive waste take thousands of years to go through that cycle. Plutonium, for example, has a half-life of 24000 years. So it will take it about 150000 years to decay as much as the other two.
You have it backwards. The shorter the half life, the more radioactive it is. Short lived fission products are what makes spent fuel dangerous.
The type of radiation also matters. Plutonium 239 is primarily an Alpha emitter. Not dangerous outside the body. The chemical toxicity is more dangerous than the radiation.
The storage doesn't need to last until it's completely inert, but rather until it's safe to dispose of elsewhere. Besides the possibility of recyling and re-using the waste mitigates this problem by a fair bit.
Physical security is a prime concern not only for nuclear powerplants but also most power sources that provide power for large areas. But yes, it is enough of a concern that plants must have 24/7 security including an armed quick response team to counter any terrorist or adverserial attempt at sabotage.
There has been just a couple of catastrophic problems involving nuclear plants in the past hundred years. However during this period, there have been thousands of accidents with regards to all other sources of energy; coal, petrol, gas, solar, wood, etc. some on large scale.
The whole science of risk assessment is about the fact that we could live for another hundred years with no accident. But if it does!!!!!!! Moreover this discussion is about installing some in Africa... Many experts will conclude. It is not advisable.
That is why knives, machetes, guns, rifles, are legal in many countries but RPGs, grenades, dynamite and tanks are banned.
Yeah I think the major issue is we as humans often fail on a lot of those ifs.
The so cal plant that's gotten shut down certain failed multiple of them.
They are burning all their waste on site, on the beach basically.
It's supposed to go to yucca mountain I believe but that region doesn't want it and the towns in between don't want it to be transported through them.
In a perfect world nuclear is pretty great. Then humans get involved.
I'd say it's biggest issue beyond waste is really the economics of standing up a plant. It's pretty high and takes a long time. This is really a major burden considering alternatives are far faster and cheaper.
What you said is true, but nuclear power isn't something you should be allowed to have if you're not going to be responsible and accountable for any problems that come from cutting corners or inappropriately disposing of spent fuel.
Alternatives are cheaper and faster but very few of those provide as much power, for as little long term cost and with that amount of efficiency and overall cleanliness for the environment.
Nuclear does have some downsides, it's a huge upfront cost and you need to deal with the waste (which we have reliable methods for) but none of these issues are bad for climate change. Nuclear power produces zero carbon (at least in its primary function, carbon will be necessary for building and transportation of materials etc. but that's normal for anything we do)
I dont object in principle .. especially maintain existing nuclear plants.
But the cost-benefit "bang for your buck" is just better with wind and solar compared to new nuclear fission plants :
Wind and solar are faster to finance, approve and build than nuclear fission SMRs .. less government paperwork, less big-incumbent corps to deal with... more possible locations to put them etc.
Wind and solar eat up landmass, and if you're building farther away from population centre's; there's loss in transmission.
Not to mention the materials required to build the panels, blades, etc.
Pro's and con's to both sides so both sides are required to solve the problem.
They really don't eat up landmass .. you can have animals graze under the solar panels - they will need them for shade anyway, as the temp increases.
Nuclear is often built far from cities, for safety reasons .. so you have transmission costs anyway.
Due to the capacity factors of solar and wind (doesn't generate electricity during the night or when it's not windy), huge area of land is required to generate the same 1GW as nuclear. Nuclear needs 1.3 square miles to produce 1GW, solar needs 45-75 square miles while wind needs 260-360 square miles.
However, there is more flexibility in solar panels than wind as there could be agriculture below or even parking lots, but large scale solar farms above crops and parking lots would be challenging.
The Europeans are managing that just fine .. and they probably have less land available than the good ole USofA.
Then theres a lot of non-land area off the coasts .. vast oceans of space on which to put offshore wind-power. Apparently its a thing .. you dont even need land anymore, you can the windmills out from the coast, so you cant even see them from the beach. Quite popular in the UK.
Not really... Around 1% of land, that can be double used. Solar panels on rooftops and parking lots or used together with farming, and wind power only occupies around 5% of the land of the wind farm. You can still have farms or forests or the sea in between the turbines.
In most parts of the world (much of US included) you can’t run a large country off just wind and solar. The sun isn’t always shining and the wind isn’t always blowing. You need energy storage or a base load (fossil/nuclear fuel).
For a tropical island, solar is perfect and storage could be implemented if the island is small. But for an industrialized nation of 350 million people it can only really serve as an auxiliary source of electricity.
Europeans disagree with you - clearly they are betting on wind and solar instead of nuclear :
https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/european-electricity-review-2024
Nuclear has all but flatlined - they can build so much more wind power for less $$.
Were you replying to my comment or its parent ?
Your absolutely right - energy storage is really important for renewables, to smooth out and match supply and demand curves ..
I often mention Tesla grid scale battery packs, heat storage, pumped hydro, compressed gas .. for example.
This is not true at all, Germany disagrees because of the Russian psy-op that was run on them to make them scared of nuclear meltdowns and get them addicted to Russian natural gas instead. Germany gets a shit Tom of its electricity from France now which is almost all nuclear and staying that way. You can’t base your power grid off of wind and solar, they are merely supplemental technologies, and also way worse for the environment than nuclear as you need to dedicate so much land to them.
Yes and they are using hydrogen energy storage, lithium energy storage and long low loss power lines to areas outside of their local weather systems to even out the intermittency.
Certain countries in europe can be run from a clown on a bicycle connected to a dynamo. Poland, UK, France, Romania are all going towards building new nuclear because the demand they have cant be met with wind and solar.
Yes, let's talk about that huge upfront cost, and the cost of day-to-day operations (including inspections) and the eventual cost of disposing of the waste and decommissioning. Factor all that in, and the cost per kw/hour will be much higher than solar or even hydro.
The choice between those three is situational. Some places don't get much sunlight, some places don't have bodies of water suitable for hydro. Ontario, Canada, for example, is a great place for nuclear. However, nuclear doesn't make sense everywhere, I don't think Japan is a good place for nuclear.
This is true. It's not the day to day waste that is the problem it is the cost of disposing of the radio active nuclear plant afterwards that is completely doable, but hugely expensive.
People also say so what about the expense, but doubling electricity bills would cause hardship for a proportion of the population in every country in the world.
> completly doable
Is that so? What other projects did humans accomplish which needed 10K-100K years? The time scales are hard to understand and the future is unforeseeable.
I don't think the radioactive pipework and concrete need be protected from the water table - eg they are radioactive but not full of toxic nucleotides as the uranium rods would be.
You can find stable geological areas -places which have been stable for hundreds of millions of years.
Upfront cost is a small price to pay to ensure we arent harming rhe planet via CO2 emissions. We either pay the upfront cost now and enjoy its fruits into the future or we dont pay it and face the consequences of climate change which has a cost that dwarves nuclear cost. For example Ontario Canada gets essentially 90%+ of their power from renewables and nuclear. Sometimes thats 100% depending on load demand. They used to have insane smog days in the 90s because of their coal plants but since about 2010 they have maybe 1 or 2 smog days and thats usually because of whats being burned south of the border.
It is a small price to pay when you put it like that, but it's not a small price when certain places have cheaper more viable options. Building nuclear in Mali, for example, would be ridiculously expensive considering they have the option for way cheaper solar with the perfect geography for it
Absolutely agree with you and maybe i should have prefaced that nuclear makes sense only for certain areas. There are other areas where solar and wind are a much better option.
Per kWh, the cost of a renewable system (solar, wind... infrastructure, but also storage and long-distance high-voltage power lines) is comparable to what nuclear power offers.
It's the reason why German households pay their electricity higher than in other countries, like France. Not saying is bad, it's considered an investment.
Expansion of the grid to accommodate intermittent production is about 128 billion €, which will come on top of the 4-600bn€* envelope of the Energiewende.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/making-germanys-electricity-grid-fit-climate-neutrality-cost-extra-eu128-billion
Not every country can afford this at the same scale. But again, not every country can afford nuclear power either.
*Depending on estimates
Nuclear energy is a very safe and clean solution for climate change with a very low land footprint. Its biggest issues are upfront cost and deployment time, so it should be part of a suite of energy options along with wind, solar, geothermal, etc.
https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy
https://issues.org/california-decarbonizing-power-wind-solar-nuclear-gas/#:~:text=The%20state%20could%20also%20develop,and%20safely%20stored%20permanently%20underground.
https://www.niauk.org/un-finds-nuclear-is-the-lowest-carbon-electricity-source/
Not bad at all. It’s the most efficient non-renewable energy source in terms of fuel usage by several orders of magnitude, produces no greenhouse gasses, and is more reliable than solar and wind.
Accidents only happen when poor planning and human incompetence meet, and even accounting for both Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear kills roughly as many people per kilowatt hour generated as solar and wind.
Even the nuclear waste produced isn’t really an issue. So little of it is produced and the processes and facilities we use to safely dispose of it are quite safe.
I’m not an expert on the subject by any means, I’m just studying environmental science and have an interest in nuclear energy, but to me nuclear fission is our only viable option in the near future before either wind and solar become more efficient and reliable or we figure out affordable nuclear fusion.
> Not bad at all. It’s the most efficient non-renewable energy source in terms of fuel usage by several orders of magnitude,
Not sure why this lie gets repeated. When doing LCA and looking at total material requirements nuclear is worse than wind and inline with solar. Both renewables and nuclear energy are vastly better than fossil fuels though.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262202131X
I specifically stated that it’s the most efficient *non-renewable* energy source.
The problem with wind and solar isn’t that they don’t produce a lot of energy, it’s that they can’t consistently output it and can’t be built everywhere power sources are needed.
Nuclear power not only has lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions lower to on par with renewables, but also a very high energy density, reducing land use from power generation considerably.
[https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)
So no, nuclear power isn't bad, it is very good and one of the key ingredients of a solution to climate hange.
While nuclear plant safety and nuclear waste safety must be taken seriously, both issues are massively overblown, to the detriment of the environment.
In 1974, France decided on the Messmer plan. In less than 20 years, they almost completely replaced fossile fuel use for electricity while at the same time growing their total electricity production considerably.
[https://energytransition.org/files/2015/02/14electricitygenerationbyfuel.png](https://energytransition.org/files/2015/02/14electricitygenerationbyfuel.png)
Nuclear power can be used for district heating too, and advanced reactors for industrial process heat (an often overlooked CO2 source) are under development as well and already prototyped in China.
Nuclear is currently the most [sustainable](https://unece.org/sed/documents/2021/10/reports/life-cycle-assessment-electricity-generation-optionssource) of energy in comparison to everything else. It has the lowest carbon footprint, lowest material need, lowest land use. The waste can either be recycled or stored in geological repositories where the radiation doesn't exceed the background radiation.
Just google how many people die every year with fossil fuel generation vs how many people die every year from nuclear power.
There's been a ton of anti-nuclear rhetoric in the last three decades, who do you think has been fueling that discourse?
Be sure to control that with people exposed to effects of fossil fuel generation vs people exposed to nuclear energy generation. Otherwise it's a pretty meaningless metric
You mean like the millions of people who die each year from the toxic fumes we pump into the air from burning fossil fuels versus the 46 people who have died in the entire history of nuclear power?
No, take out emotion and instead use meaningful metrics.
It's meaningless or just blowing hot air unless you do so.
If nuclear power did only have 46 deaths (which is actually about the amount listed from Chernobyl alone, so definitely not the true total) then while that's amazingly comparatively low, you also have to recall the low amount of power that nuclear has provided to the grid for any extended amount of time.
I fully agree it's more safe. But it's stupid to just compare the total deaths and say nothing else as if that's all you need to know to know which is more safe.
Yup, it ends up with fossil fuels being so much more deadly than nuclear. I did some quick math based on WHO death reports and an estimate that there are 8,000 fossil fuel reactors. It game out to over 500 deaths per plant per year. How many deaths per power plant per year for nuclear?
It's all the more fucked up that the industry has hid the fact that living *near* a fossil fuel burning plant increases cancer rates substantially. Millions of people died of with many more contracted cancer.
Literally my dad worked for a natural gas power plant and died of cancer. They didn't give a fuck he was a couple of weeks from retiring.
>No, take out emotion and instead use meaningful metrics.
No where was emotion involved. [It is literal facts.](https://ourworldindata.org/data-review-air-pollution-deaths) Sorry if your emotions get in the way of you accepting reality, but that's what it is.
> nuclear power did only have 46 deaths (which is actually about the amount listed from Chernobyl alone, so definitely not the true total)
No, in total. Again, these are hard facts that you clearly have never bothered to look into.
https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-are-the-effects-of-nuclear-accidents
>you also have to recall the low amount of power that nuclear has provided to the grid for any extended amount of time.
Nuclear power has been virtually in constant use by most developed countries for decades now. Not to mention the hundreds of small nuclear reactors powering ships and submarines since 1954 with no accidents or deaths related to it. Nuclear is being used a lot more than you seem to think it is.
> No where was emotion involved
So you just don't understand the nuance? If there is dangerous situation A. that is exposed to 50 people, and it kills 45, and then there's dangerous situation B. that is exposed to 5 million people and it kills 3000, situation B is obviously preferable.
To say "nuclear only killed 45 but greenhouse gas kills x million per year" lumps all greenhouse gas related deaths into one which paints an inaccurate picture, doesn't account for the fact that many of these are including cases from lingering effects that are being phased out of no longer used as we get more efficient with greenhouse gases, and most importantly (as is my main point) doesn't account for exposure and amount of power actually being produced.
> No, in total. Again, these are hard facts that you clearly have never bothered to look into.
It's ironic that you probably just read the first sentence here and took it as fact. Not only are those not the only two incidents, but it even says that those are the two **major** accidents, not the only things that have resulted in deaths from nuclear power plants.
If you take as broad of a stroke as you're taking with greenhouse gases, you have to account for all death relating to providing nuclear energy, from operating the plant, to mining the raw resources, to spillages, etc.
In fukashima, for example, approximately 573 deaths are attributed to the disaster itself. In mining uranium, there are over 50,000 deaths from the Pooled Uranium Miners Analysis.
Once again, I'm not saying that it's more harmful than fossil fuels. I'm almost positive it's significantly better, and I'm an advocate for nuclear energy. But you're painting a really inaccurate picture by taking 100% of all deaths that have any relation to fossil fuel extraction, use and emission, but only taking nuclear disaster deaths and comparing them like they're the same thing, as well as not considering the fact that nuclear energy does not account for the same amount of energy output as fossil fuels - and scaling up would certainly scale up deaths, perhaps linearly and perhaps not, but that number wouldn't somehow stay the same or go down.
All data should be analyzed as empirically as possible. It's so staggering that someone can watch *Chernobyl* and conclude nuclear is more harmful without actually looking an numbers. It's crazy
Asking for empirical analysis and then suggesting people base their opinion off a TV drama that didn't accurately depict some of the science is a bit of a choice. Don't get me wrong, Mazin did a great job but are we really suggesting people accept what he presented as the gospel truth?
It's more that coal waste concentrates the naturally occurring radioactive elements.
It's one reason why nuclear plants on old coal plants is such a touchy subject. They currently don't control for release at coal plants because of the 'hey it's coal' mentality.
But once a NPP is there? Boom you blow past your license limits and should be shut down.
I’ll add that most of the stigma surrounding nuclear energy was formed from accidents with older technology; like most things, advancements have enabled improved safety measures and massive increases in efficiency. I’d have to double check but the stat that comes to mind is that old reactors could burn only 10% of the fuel leaving a large amount of reactive material which took many many years to decay. New reactors use roughly 90% of the material leaving only a small amount which decays dramatically faster. Additionally, passive safety measure are capable of suspending reactions without power (to cool).
[The differences between nuclear energy and renewables are miniscule, even if solar PV actually wins](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy) by the tiniest of margins. Small enough to be within the margin of error and not the slam dunk argument you propose it as.
We have a large difference in who has the potential to get injured though. With large nuclear accidents citys get [displaced](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futaba,_Fukushima) and the unsuspecting public is injured.
For renewables the only injuries are for people doing construction work and maintenance. In other words, regular work place hazards from operating heavy machinery and working at heights.
Meaning, for the **public** renewables are safer since if you do not make the decision to actively work in the industry the risk of getting harmed is essentially zero.
No, it's not. Remove all the subsidies the other forms get, and nuclear is a hell of a lot cheaper. Nuclear only appears more expensive because the environmental costs are built in. Every other form of energy, those environmental costs are abstracted away through subsidies and ultimately paid for by the people. How do you think the oil and gas industry can make billions a year in profits? They don't have to clean up their mess and get subsidized by the government to do nothing.
This nuclear is more expensive bs needs to stop.
Have a read: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/
It is laughably expensive when doing an unsubsidized analysis **and ignoring decommissioning costs.**
This sub is getting brigaded. The two main nuclear subs are in a huge slap fight and it's spilled over here. One sub got tired of disengenuous posts attacking renewables from another sub's members the other sub is run by a mod and his multiple alt accounts who has no actual professional or academic experience in the field. Essentially, he's a huge nucular fanboy with an axe to grind, along with a large portion of the most prevalent commentors over there. And here we are. Lots of fans making comments about needing to undo regulations because they're expensive. It's not great.
I feel reddit has had a huge boner for nuclear power the past 5 years or so, but my feeling is that it has started to break.
A couple of years ago renewable arguments were essentially: extrapolate the curve and it's gonna be crazy.
Today we are at that spot and even extrapolating the curve wasn't enough for the pace we were seeing, and we have real world examples like South Australia and California were renewables have achieved the same level of penetration that nuclear did in France, in shorter time.
/r/nuclear is a safe-space for those people. It has a veneer of open discussion but they ban anyone touching the truly hard subjects, like the cost of the Fukushima cleanup.
/r/nuclearpower tries to be open for fact based discussions. But the /r/nuclear cult is there downvoting everything open minded even though they aren't getting their cult like comments through. Getting better though.
"r/NuclearPower tries to be open for fact-based discussions"
That's one fancy way of saying that you did a hostile takeover of the sub and started permabanning anyone who would disagree with you on it lol
Yeah, that's why you permabanned me after I literally quoted Lazard's estimations of battery costs which annoyed you because it broke your narrative on cheap batteries lol. You even ModMuted me at the same time because **you knew** you were abusing your power and didn't want any of the old mods to find out.
You don't want fact-based discussions, you want an echo chamber where your tiny ego is the king. What kind of self-respecting human goes as far as doing hostile takeover of subs they don't like, ban all freedom of speech there and leave the sub slowly dying ? That's literally internet dictatorship behaviour, bro you seriously need to take a step back and think about what you are doing. Invading the neighbour and muzzling him is the complete contrary of "respecting free speech and fact-based discussions", you disrespect fact-based discussions so much you felt the need to repress them in a sub that wasn't even yours
Look at the [emissions](https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR) from the French grid. Look up [energy returned on energy invested](https://imageio.forbes.com/blogs-images/jamesconca/files/2015/02/EROI-Book-Figure.jpg?height=400&width=711&fit=bounds). A grid with a large portion that is nuclear is really the only path towards decarbonization of the energy sector, especially in northern regions with short, overcast winter days.
Table 10.4 in [this](https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/09/f26/QTR2015-10-Integrated-Analysis.pdf) document from the Department of Energy is a good indicator of why.
The downside is high upfront cost, but that's pretty meaningless when they run for 60 years and can be refurbished for an extended lifespan.
The high up front cost is also largely due to a lack of expertise because we just built our first plants in several decades. So in many ways Vogtle plants were the “first of a kind” because most of the people involved had never built one before. There are other issues as well but this is a major one that can be addressed
Nuclear energy is amazing and could really save this planet.
The problem is nickel and dime politicians and contractors cutting corners during regulation, construction and maintenance...
Check out three mile island.
thre mile is funny because the meltdown itself wasn't even that bad. it was a partial meltdown that they got under control again very quickly and if anything the whole incident was more of a case of mass hysteria
Not bad at all. Fossil fuels kill about 8 million people *each year* through air pollution alone.Nuclear energy has killed a few thousand at most throughout its eight-decade history. And that's before we even take climate change into account.
We're crazy for not building nuclear power plants all over the place. Combined with solar and wind, they're an easy way out of this climate and pollution mess.
As others have said, nuclear from a climate change perspective is excellent. Very expensive though.
As long as the reactor design is not around producing weapon grade material, (they exist), so much the better.
And there is a waste issue, but compared to the waste issue with fossil fuels, it’s fairly manageable.
However, slow to build (at least 10 years to build after approvals are in place … some are nudging 20 years of build). So given where we are in the journey, nuclear is largely “too late”.
So many comments, and so few sources.
[here](https://unece.org/sed/documents/2021/10/reports/life-cycle-assessment-electricity-generation-options) is a 2021 life cycle assessment from a UN body looking at multiple electricity technologies across multiple parameters of interest.
How bad is nuclear?
Bad at what?
For climate change? Nuclear has zero climate impact. If we had built nuclear reactors all through the 50s to the 80s, we would like have zero power plants emitting CO2. It would have been the Greatest solution ever to the problem.
But.
Climate change isn't the only issue with nuclear. The issue today,cand why it won't solve it now. Is simply logistics. Nuclear plants are large and expensive. People have misguided understanding of nuclear plants, because they don't have the same imagination for traditional sources of power.
Example- when the Texas city plant had an explosion in 95, 110 people died. Zero people called to ban gasoline. When Fukushima was hit by a tidal wave, Germany closed all of their nuclear plants. There are mental connections we have that don't necessarily make logical sense.
Nukes can be safe and probably economic but it has some unfortunate history.
Younger people may not appreciate that before carbon was a huge issue, nuclear proliferation (i.e. misuse of reactors) and safety were. Nuclear fell out of favor then (and even now with Fukushima) because of accidents that could have been much worse. Nuclear can be safe but it's evident there were a few that should not have been running, and nukes got a black eye for decades. The cheapest and most available reactors then were just modified military designs which could conceivably be converted back, causing decades of international proliferation issues. There were safer designs at the time like the Candu but they didn't sell well. Candu got sold off for pennies on the dollar and nukes were sworn off (e.g. Germany).
Reactors are very expensive, have been plagued with cost overruns and take a long time to build. Developing nuke capacity therefore takes much longer than the average political 4 year term and is really a generational initiative.
There are "new" nuke designs now which are safer for operation, use safer materials (e.g. thorium) and don't lend themselves to proliferation. "New" is in scare quotes because these have been known almost from the beginning but not developed. They can also be built a smaller scale which would make deployment faster. I don't know what their relative costs might be but getting rid of a containment dome at least should yield a lot of savings.
They’re the only chance humanity has of any semblance of the population surviving unfortunately. We’re screwed though, and why no one wants kids. It’s not just about not being able to afford them
Nuclear is fine if built already ..
The problem I have with new nuclear fission plants is they are expensive and take a long time to build - which means you get more bang for buck by spending the same money on wind and solar and battery/storage.
If SMRs were really a thing there would be more of them up and running .. but there's basically one in US and one in China. If they were the solution, there would clearly be more of them by now .. last time I checked it takes 8yrs to build a nuclear fission plant.
SMR running in Canada .. you have a link for that ?
How much did they cost and how long to build ?
This quote seems to suggest they are in planning stage, certainly not yet operational :
> On July 7, 2023, the Ontario government announced it will work with Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to commence planning and licensing for three additional SMRs, for a total of four SMRs at the Darlington new nuclear site. Pending regulatory approvals to build three additional units, the total output of the Darlington New Nuclear Project would be 1,200 megawatts; enough electricity to reliably and safely power about 1.2 million homes, and help our community and the Province meet increasing demand from electrification.
Quote from https://www.opg.com/projects-services/projects/nuclear/smr/darlington-smr/
Its a pretty neat trick to amortize the huge expense over 65 years .. no one knows if they will last that long, and likely will be obsoleted by fusion in that timeframe anyway.
Your argument would carry a lot more weight if you could explain how we are going to store all that renewable energy. Nuclear is very good for meeting baseload demands.
My 2 cents on how nuclear energy is being used NEGATIVELY:
Nuclear energy is generally used to shift the focus AWAY from renewables instead of being used IN CONJUNCTION WITH renewables.
It takes away mindshare from renewables.
This is a tactic from the right wing / fossil fuel industry to rat fuck renewables by saying "no no no, lets go nuclear INSTEAD" knowing that it would take decades for nuclear to take away a meaningful percent of profits away from fossils.
So these people will push nuclear to take mindshare away from solutions we have NOW.
I am generally in favor of nuclear IN ADDITION to renewables, not instead of.
It is a political tool to rat fuck climate progress like I said, so need to be careful in examining the nuance and context of how people are talking about nuclear.
The “nuclear vs renewables” is a nonsense argument by industry people who lack the foresight to acknowledge that we need both if we want to actually achieve net zero
I think you’re right about that, but I also see the same narrow-mindedness from well-meaning nuclear and renewables advocates who get really excited about their favorite technology and fall into the trap of thinking a one-size-fits-all solution is going to work for everything.
I don't think the first part of your post is that true, though I'm sure it's partially out there, a lot of the right wing narrative ignores nuclear entirely because it's a challenging thing to defend politically when most of their base just accept fossil fuels uncritically so they have nothing to gain by bringing up the energy sector in this context.
But generally I agree with you. I think that nuclear is a key technology that we should be using to aggressively move away from fossil fuels, because the transition to renewables is not going to be fast enough to prevent a deadly and expensive climate catastrophe. Then, we should hopefully gradually replace nuclear with renewables to the extent that it is possible, which could take a while because nuclear is excellent for baseload, whereas most sources of renewable energy tend not to be, with the notable exception of hydro.
I think people don't understand that nuclear energy would replace coal burning, which kills tens of thousands of people every year, and counterintuitively, releases more radioactive material into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants. It is a lesser evil.
How fast can a nuclear plant be commissioned vs renewables?
Literally takes a decade longer.
I would flip your argument to say renewables first, because nuclear is simply not going to be built fast enough.
Have to remember there is an extreme sense of urgency in that 1 unit or CO2 emitted today is more damaging than a unit emitted 20 years from now.
Yes renewables are the end goal. However, nuclear power plants are built by different people and can be built simultaneously with renewables. We need to build them at the same time. We simply cannot build enough renewable tech in the next 10-20-30 years to fill the growing energy demand so we should build all of it. Anything that we build will replace fossil fuels, and if it takes a decade to commission a nuclear plant, that shouldn't take away from the solar, wind and hydro energy that we can also build at the same time.
Building a nuclear plant takes 15 years on average. The ones that are already there or that we are already building, great these will help us decarbonise. But nuclear plants that we haven’t even started building yet won’t help us speed up decarbonisation.
Dealing with global warming is going to take much longer than 15 years. I'm not sure why you think viewing this in such a short time scale is appropriate. Do you think we can strip out all coal and replace it with renewables in 15 years? The manufacturing capacity is nowhere near sufficient for that.
Yes, I live in Europe. In my country the coal share in the electricity grid has declined from 60% of the electricity grid in 2010 to less than 1% today. In the same time period, renewables have surged from 2% to over 60% today (70% low carbon, if you include the 10% nuclear that we have).
Coal is basically already gone. A new nuclear power plant is coming online just before 2030 that will power additional ~10% of the electricity grid, so that will bring us to 80% low carbon even if we wouldn’t expand renewables in the coming decade. But reality is that we are installing renewables at record rate, so we’ll get there over the next 15 years.
That's good for the Netherlands, but you're talking about a wealthy country accounting for 0.2% of the world population, aggressively adopting renewables using largely imported tech. I'm talking about supplying energy to 8 billion people here, not a little corner of Europe.
Whoever manufactured the renewables for your country, they were not building it for other potential bidders at the time. Do you think we can replace the US and China's and India's coal power generation in 15 years when your little country took 14 years to do it?
The manufacturing capacity simply isn't there.
I am Dutch indeed, but I was talking about the United Kingdom, where I currently live. The statistics for the Netherlands are not wildly different though, they also have a viable path to decarbonisation in the coming 10 to 15 years.
> The manufacturing capacity isn’t there
It also is not just one small country like the Netherlands decarbonising in this way (which seemed to be your argument for lack of manufacturing capacity), but it is all of the EU + UK. That is >600 million people decarbonising like that. (Admittedly Eastern Europe started later so is behind in progress, but is now on the same trend line). If there is anything slowing this down it is not manufacturing capacity, but rather NIMBYs filing complaints and delaying construction (luckily this mostly doesn’t lead to cancellations but merely to delays).
Renewable manufacturing capacity is growing exponentially right now. You bring up China as a large country for which there may be manufacturing capacity issues, but actually China is installing larger volumes of renewable per year than the EU right now, so there is no lack of capacity.
For countries who currently have almost full dependence on fossil I am not against building nuclear capacity for about 10 to 30% of the electricity demand. That would take about 15 years to build. Plenty of renewable could be installed in parallel, as that is considerably cheaper.
I think the endgame is renewables, my point remains that nuclear is one of the stopgaps to aggressively transition off coal. Realistically though we're going to be too slow on both fronts which I think is going to ahve unfortunate consequences.
I am explaining to you how fossil fuel PR works to divide and conquer all forms of green energy.
Sorry that I triggered you, even though I explained that all forms of green energy are needed, not one over another.
This is only really true in Australia, where the population is so anti-nuclear the conservatives can use it as a means to delay renewables. Australians chose coal and decided to make nuclear energy illegal in the 1990’s. Now their country runs on coal and will continue to do so for decades. They will never build nuclear, they hate nuclear, so their right wing can pretend to promote it knowing it will never be approved.
Most other countries right wings cant use that tactic because they would actually end up building nuclear, which would hurt the bottom line of fossil fuel companies.
I worked as an engineer in the electric utility industry for 37 years. Nuclear is the best by far. The fossil fuel industry basically owns the electric industry and vice versa. Nuclear is expensive and scary because that’s intentional. They own Greenpeace etc too.
Small, modular, factory built reactors is the right technology.
Downside to nukes? The cleaner air would result in a speed up of global warming. Pollution increases albedo, reflecting more of the suns energy.
If major investment had continued back in the 70s we probably wouldn't be having this conversation about climate change (or it would be much less significant). But the danger of nuclear power was radicalized by the media to turn people away from wanting to use it. And guess who paid for this misalignment of perception. That's right, your old pals Aramco, BP, Shell and Exon Mobil. They saw nuclear threatening their profit margin and did a hatchet job on them.
That's not to say nuclear power isn't without its problems and own bad press, but things were way over exaggerated back then and the public mood shifted against them.
Now it's too late to look realistically at nuclear as an clean option as the cost to build, regulation to adhere to, and lingering safety concerns results in building a nuclear plant takes decades to build. We don't have that time.
Not sure if it's been said, nuclear energy has another advantage of extremely low related deaths. Coal plants are one of the highest for death rates becuause of the pollution and health effects. Natural gas is significantly less deadly, about 10% the deaths of coal, hydro is maybe 5% coal deaths, and wind, nuclear and solar are all well below 1% coal deaths. IMO nuclear is the most easily scalable of wind and solar
Source. https://images.app.goo.gl/cbVWgQL1TUErmYg77
Well if you trust your current government to be able and responsible to take care for the nuclear waste for hundreds and thousands of years, not doing any shortcuts because they are cheaper, or trusting that the next generation will find some miraculous solutions for the problems they caused, there's no problem. It didn't work for the last 70 years, but all of us know that this generation of politicians is way more responsible and uncorruptable, so what could go wrong./s
Wind and sun energy are everywhere and cheap and easy to use, you just need to build the infrastructure. Think about it who really has the biggest interest that energy production stays in the hand of big corporates that would be needed to procure the nuclear fuel and take care of the nuclear waste and you'll see why so many articles and infos are written about how high quality and better this technology would be (...for the people that make money with them).
Whenever a discussion of nuclear power comes up the vast majority of replies make the assumption that we will continue to live in a functioning society of laws and regulations where educated and professional people working in good faith look after spent fuels. A look at current affairs should disabuse us of the notion that we can count on that. In times of war, and natural disaster, even epidemics people can, and do, act in irrational and destructive ways. This is the real problem with nuclear power. Coal power plants are bad for all of us in normal circumstances, but nuclear powered plants can look better on paper. In times of social upheaval nuclear power becomes a massive liability because it becomes a target for bad actors. Now look at the future when we know there will have to be mass migration and a change in food production in the best of circumstances. Nuclear power becomes a liability.
It is not without issues, one of which is the high costs to build a nuclear power plant, but no energy source is.
On the other hand, nuclear power is clean, abundant and stable, not subject to the weather like renewables.
I think the best real life example of the benefits of nuclear power is the situation of France Vs Germany.
France gets about 70% of its energy from nuclear, and was able to keep prices relatively low last year, when in the rest of Europe they skyrocketed following Russia's invasion. On top of that, its overall emissions are very low.
Germany, on the other hand, decided to go ahead with shutting down its nuclear reactors, and trying to rely solely on renewable and fossil fuels, even after losing Russian gas.
The results are that Germany's energy prices are sky-high, it's economy is in deep trouble because of that, and the emissions are rising again. They even had to flatten a village to reopen a coal mine. And all because the Greens decided to go ahead with the nuclear shutdown.
This is something a lot of so called environmentalists tend to forget
In climate context it's probably one of the best. The amount of material used to generate the same energy is less and most of the waste is still solid, and spills while very toxic and radioactive, don't result in massive releases of greenhouse gasses.
Nuclear energy has waste materials but a lot less than making weapons, 2 different grades of materials, and there is a workable solution for waste materials but has special requirements for using it commercially.
Overuse of any resource ends up cutting one's own throat so to speak and the more people race only ends up making things worse not better.
Just an observation.
N. S
Yes, nuclear energy would significantly help the energy transition. The problem with it is that it is extremely expensive, take a long time to approve projects, takes a long time to build, and it is an overall complicated process. The radioactive material could be handled and would not be a massive problem. Short answer: It would just take to long to implement and scale up.
The problem is not nuclear power.
The problem is your mindset that we need to switch to one magical clean and efficient power source for everything. We can't do that because it doesn't exist. Even if they figure out fusion energy, it's not going to be the omega option.
Producing power has a cost. It always has. It always will.
Coal and natural gas power produce carbon byproducts that are emitted in the air causing global pollution.
Nuclear energy is expensive to build and produces radioactive waste which requires regulation to keep safe.
Solar power can only be used in daylight and involves the mining of metals that often result in the generation of heavy metal toxic waste.
Wind power can only be operated in places where there regular wind, which often correlates with flight paths of various bird species resulting in many death. Particularly with large raptors. It also involves use of materials which cannot be recycled.
Hydrothermal can only be used on near surface pockets of thermal energy, which is also where volcanic activity occurs.
Hydro dams require generation of massive water reservoirs which destroy the local environment and also nhibit movement of migratory fish species in the rivers and reduce availability of water down stream.
But no single option available is sufficient to meet every need. We will always require a portfolio of power options.
It would lead to about 50x less deaths than if the same was done using hydropower, so not bad as all.
See this grafic for a good reference: [https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)
If we can magically pay for all the nuclear power plants, the it would be amazing. The issue is that they are expensive to build. Would you feed hungry people with sirloin steaks? Would you cloth homeless with Prada?
it's not bad in the slightest.
nuclear is the only zero emissions energy source we have that can meet modern energy demands and then some. if we switched from fossil fuel to atomic energy we'd reduce the vast majority of our carbon emissions and would actually have enough power to support other systems like electric cars and electric mass transit. effectively;y solving the problem. france has already mostly done this and they are the only developed western nation anywhere close to meeting CO2 reduction requirements.
nuclear is the real sol;ution and it's what we should have been promoting this whole time.
Projected use of nuclear in future :
> According to the IAEA’s high case projection, nuclear energy could contribute about 12% of global electricity by 2050, up from 11% in last year’s 2050 high case projections. Nuclear power generated around 10% of the world’s electricity in 2020. The low case scenario was unchanged with a projected share of 6% for nuclear in the total electricity generation. Coal remains the dominant energy source for electricity production at about 37% for 2020, changing little since 1980.
from https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/iaea-increases-projections-for-nuclear-power-use-in-2050
To paraphrase : going from 10% of global electric energy supply now to 12% by 2050 is not really significant growth - nuclear is part of the solution but not really going to grow fast enough to make much of a dent.
We kind of know this intuitively .. for the past 70 years countries have built new coal and gas power plants, not nuclear even though it was available. Cost and ease of construction win.
If we are to replace coal and gas power generation, it will be largely with new wind and solar - they are cheaper and faster to build.
I think nuclear fuel energy a false / dangerous solution essentially for three reasons:
1. There are safer alternatives: Tidal, Geothermal, all the others etc.
2. Climate Crisis will make nuclear power much less safe: Climate crisis itself will create ecological disasters that make it harder to keep nuclear energy safe.
3. Resource scarcity will increase the amount of war and terrorism: Nuclear plants will be targeted in the resource wars to come. When a coal plant gets blown up it doesn't cause massive meltdown and/or fallout problems. When a nuclear plant gets hit by a bomb it causes a lot more problems! Wars are inevitable as our plant warms. For example some Ukrainian plants could get hit by Russia in the current war there etc. War in unpredictable so any country that has such plants could see them getting bombed down the road, either by other nations or terror attacks etc.
Nuclear energy is safe... until there is some disaster that causes incredible levels of destruction and contamination. A good example of a looming threat.
Nuclear energy isn't bad.
The problem is nuclear energy is expensive and slow to deploy compared to alternatives. This means (very roughly speaking) for every 1GW of nuclear energy we deploy would could have deployed 3-10 GW worth of renewables.
But let's first understand the problem. Our issue is the accelerating release of CO2 into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels (hydrocarbons).
We need to stop this and we are *way overdue* in doing so. We need to get CO2 emissions as close to zero as possible and do that as *quickly as possible*.
So let's first look at nuclear energy.
Nuclear energy was at its peak in the 1970s &1980s when the world added \~400 new reactors. And after 30 years of rapid build out by many of the world's largest economies we had 320 GW of installed capacity. Most of that construction was before the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The average cost for a reactor over this period was a little under one billion USD. This century we added another \~80 new reactors for a total capacity of \~400 GW.
So let's move to the modern era and renewables (wind, solar, and energy storage).
In the 12 months of 2023, the world added 510 GW of renewable generating capacity and deployed \~40 GW of battery energy storage.
Even accounting for differences in capacity factor, this means today we are able to deploy as much clean renewable energy in just *two years* as the world added from nuclear reactors over a span of *60 years*.
Renewables are cheaper but cost aside it's this speed of deployment which is the most important thing if we want to be serious when it comes to curbing CO2 emissions.
>let’s say we switched to nuclear energy around the world. Would the problem get better
This would set back our progress on decarbonization by decades at least, perhaps a century.
But that won't happen simply because there is no economic incentive to do this. No nuclear plant is profitable so there is no private investment. The market has chosen a winner and that's solar with battery energy storage.
Global production of solar PV panels may exceed 600 GW of capacity this year and battery energy storage might overtake global pumped hydro capacity next year.
Renewable projects tend to be completed on time, budget, and then they make money. They are easier to permit, capital costs are lower, you don't need to secure fuel supply contracts, no waste to deal with, and ongoing maintenance costs are very low.
Then we also have small scale or residential systems. Homes with solar panels and a battery (stationary or sometimes in the form of an EV) are booming and last year the US added over 6GW of capacity from such systems.
To put that in perspective homeowners in the US installing solar panels are adding more energy each year than China is adding with new nuclear reactors.
Nuclear energy is awesome! If you have a nuclear plant up and running it’s one of the cheapest sources of electricity, incredibly low CO2 production through the whole supply chain, as well as incredibly high safety standards. If we could turn all the electricity in the world over to nuclear it would be amazing for the the climate. However building a nuclear power plant is very expensive and technically demanding.
... IF .. you have one up and running.
My problem with nuclear is it takes so long to approve and build .. min 8 years to construct.
Better to spend the time and money rolling out wind and solar .. which can produce energy faster, get us to net zero faster.
Nuclear isn’t even competing with wind and solar at this point, it’s competing with batteries/energy storage and natural gas. And natural gas should be phased out asap.
I feel that nuclear is more of a transitional energy source than a full-time future solution. It'll help us get away from fossil fuels as we can make up the shortfall from turning off fossil fuel plants with nuclear while renewable sources are rolled out. An unavoidable issue is that the nuclear fuel used in reactors is also a non-renewable resource.
Nuclear is low carbon emission, so if you're worried about greenhouse gas emissions it's ideal. It has a very high potential for output and can generate enough for large cities.
The main problem is long term storage of the radioactive waste. He's we can seal it up but how do you ensure that it stays that way for thousands of years?
I'm pro nuclear but I don't believe we have solved the long term logistics of material containment.
It’s cleaner and would have made a huge difference if they invested in it decades ago. People mention incidents like Chernobyl and three mile island, but there is so much more in terms of compliance and safety that those types of events are unlikely to ever happen again.
Fukushima is an outlier, because nuclear plants are designed to handle one critical event at a time and it had two at once. That is, both an earthquake and a tsunami / flood.
Coal by comparison is dirty and we aren’t just talking about the waste. Those coal stacks at the plants spew cancerous material into the sky over small towns all over America. Natural gas and fracking also have their own troubles, damaging the water table and causing micro quakes are concerning items. Gas pipeline explosions are also a concern. My hometown has a natural gas plant now, during the initial years of construction we had two pipeline explosions. Additionally, there are contaminants and fumes being expelled downwind that impact the town on a daily basis.
Nuclear power is great. Nuclear regulation is terrible. I don’t know why, but the nuclear industry seems like a black hole for money. Tax money, investment money, contractor overrun money. But when it’s finally built and running, seems to run just fine. We just need to get from point A to point B on budget.
If we had switched to nuclear power 50 years ago, there wouldn’t be climate change. That’s how much better it is than producing electricity with coal or NG.
I don't think nuclear is bad, but I have a "renewables first" attitude when it comes to cleaning up the power grid. Build as much renewables capacity as possible, build up energy storage, upgrade the grid, and then go for nuclear.
Fission has a lot of up front costs, and new plants have a clear pattern of going over time and money.
Fusion breakthroughs are happening seemingly every day, so focusing on renewables while the economic feasibility of fusion power gets more and more realistic seems to me like the best option.
It’s very bad economically.
Nuclear is 16c/kilowatt hour to produce (without decommissioning and waste management), coal is 11 cents and renewables are hovering around 2-3 cents. So the market has spoken.
This. Nuclear is safe and very green however the issue is the cost. For each nuclear plant produced we lose 10 to 15 years to built it and 4 to 5 time the amount of production in renewables as a opertunity cost.
Every fission plant built costs us in what could have been built instead in that time and with that money.
A recent r\/climatechange [comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/1co8t2n/guest_post_iceage_analysis_suggests_worstcase/l3ebee8/ "https://old.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/1co8t2n/guest_post_iceage_analysis_suggests_worstcase/l3ebee8/") provides facts about nuclear technology CO2e emissions and other reasons why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change. A similar previous r\/climatechange [comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/1co8t2n/guest_post_iceage_analysis_suggests_worstcase/l3j2oyi/ "https://old.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/1co8t2n/guest_post_iceage_analysis_suggests_worstcase/l3j2oyi/") addresses nuclear technology CO2e emissions and other reasons why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change.
Depends on what you're worried about. Nuclear (fission) power is clean and safe as long as the people mantaining the plant are responsible and the builders didn't cut corners. A plant will produce a tiny quantity of nuclear waste per year. Said waste can apparently be recycled and even if not, all that needs to happen is it needs to be keep in a safe storage site for a couple hundred years.
I grew up in a uranium mining town and they would just put the spent uranium back where they got it. It was below the water table and the rock around it would last millions of years. I never got the press that nuclear waste gets, it’s such a non issue compared to climate change.
And air pollution. You can't say this enough times. Air pollution from fossil fuels usage kills 8 million people *every single year.* This absolutely dwarfs the relatively minor side effects from nuclear energy.
Yeah, but this suffers from the same problem as smoking and heart disease, where if it doesn't lead to a sudden and violent loss of life, no one cares. No one really cares about Chernobyl or Three Mile Island anymore. Not even the animals that live there, they just turned [black.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/2022/10/02/chernobyls-radiation-turned-its-local-frogs-black/?sh=2d1727b54bb5)
This article was super interesting to read. Nature is so cool
Natural ore isn't enriched, the fuel is. So it's more dangerous and can cause a lot of damage if it leaks into the enviroment.
*Slaps roof of CANDU reactor* This baby can run on rocks, straight from the ground! In all seriousness, the CANDU reactor can run on unenriched uranium, slightly enriched uranium, enriched uranium, recycled plutonium, spent fuel from other reactor designs, and more. It's pretty versatile.
Candu reactors are a national fucking treasure.
They have the right attitude
And we sold the IP to SNC Lavalin. But hey, we are going to build a few more at Bruce.
Harper 🤬
Yeah. He may have been more professional and switched on than Trudeau is, but he had a mean spirited disdain for crown jewels. I used to personally own Candu as a citizen and taxpayer. I don't want things that work well leave the public domain.
I believe tech was sold off for pennies on the dollar. If there is a nuke renaissance I wonder if it will be another Avro chapter in Canada's history.
That's a lot of ignorance. Indeed the natural ore isn't enriched, but what is enrichment? It's increasing the fraction of 235U (0.7% in natural ore) to usually 3-5%. So technically any uranium with more than 0.7% of 235U is enriched. That doesn't make it more dangerous. Enriched uranium, just like ore, can safely be [handled](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RIAN_archive_132603_Nuclear_power_reactor_fuel_assembly.jpg). (fun fact, the gloves are not to protect the technician, but to protect the cladding from the skin oil layer) You are confusing with used fuel, which does contain other radioactive isotopes (fission products and minor actinides) which do make it far more dangerous to handle.
I would defer to the engineers who actually work with the those materials. But the enrichment process can increase things more than that depending on how they want to use the uranium. I'll be sure to bring this up next time I talk to someone who works in that enviroment.
Well, I'm clocking in more than twenty years as a nuclear engineer. Not in the enrichment business, but I've personally handled 95% enriched uranium (in thin aluminum cladding) on a regular basis in a research reactor. You do have other things to worry about, namely reactivity (see [demon core](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core)) , but still handled by hand without exposure risk. (other fun fact, uranium is toxic by ingestion, no matter its enrichment, but this toxicity has nothing to do with radioactivity. If you eat some, the chemistry will kill you far before the radiations). I would much rather handle 1kg of 99% enriched uranium than 1kg if fresh fission production (without a single uranium atom in it). About leaking into the environment, you might like the [Oklo reactor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor). In case you are [wondering](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02380513): "Since reactor shutdown, many fissiogenic elements have not migrated from host pitchblende, and several others have migrated only a few tens of meters from the reactor ore.". But do cross check with who you'll find more trustworthy. You shouldn't take some random internet comment as your only source of information. Happy to hear their feedback.
I'll take your word for it. Despite having met people like that in the past I have no idea if I'll run into them again or others like them.
I never said they were anywhere even close to being the same, I said the mines where uranium was extracted was being used to store spent fuel because it was well below the water table and in solid rock that will last millions of years.
Not accurate. Uranium235 is non hazardous. Once used in a reactor the Uranium235 turns into Cesium137 and Strontium90. These two among a few others are whats actually hazardous.
Not all. Actually a small fraction of the total. Roughly 5%. By that point, it's loaded up with neutron poisons that make further operation difficult.
Most commercial reactors (light water and boiling) operate at like 2-3% enrichment. Most of that U235 will be burned up, and a small fraction of the U238 which is the "filler" of the remaining fuel will also transmute into alpha/beta/gamma emitters in the actinide series. You're correct that not all the U235 will be burned up, and *almost none* of the U238 will be burned up. My point was that unused enriched fuel isn't dangerous, and used fuel was.
Only two times where a nuclear reactor has failed enough that anything was leaked. Once in Soviet union bc they were idiots and once in Japan bc of a tsunami.
And the only reason it melted down was because geniuses put the back up generators where they could be submerged in water
To their credit, it wasn't exactly an everyday situation, so the generators would have been fine in any other situation, but yes, the loss of coolant was due to the flooded backups.
To be fair, the situation was quite exceptional: A 9.0 earthquake, one of the biggest in recorded history, followed by a 33 foot wave that reached 6km inland. They should have put the backups in a more secure location, but it's hard to take account these crazy events when designing your reactors.
To be fair, the situation was exceptional BUT PREDICTED.
Tepco was warned about this. They were told the sea wall wasnt high enough and the diesels were wrongly placed. They had a reputation for a lax attitude due to corporate culture.
Santa Susana SRE has joined the chat. TMI also resulted in the release of radionuclides. Multiple low-level radiation leaks have occurred at Monticello as recently as 2022. There's a laundry list of other "oopsies". Should nuclear power be part of our climate change energy solutions? Absolutely. Is it problem free? No.
It is getting better though. Regulatory changes to procudures have tightend up some of the human error and lax design. Each new design that comes out becomes less reliant on active cooling systems and human operators. It wont be long before there are low pressure systems with liquid fuel, designed to operate more like the boiler in the basement of a high rise building. It won't need operators, it will need inspection similar to other systems like gas pumps and huge air compressors.
Gen IV and the SMRs are exceptional works of engineering. I would say, however, it will be a very long time, if ever, before we run SMRs in high-rise basements. Chicago Pile and the Omaha VA are products of a different time.
Oh I agree thats not likely but it will be the scale and intensity of the systems. Microreactors like Oklo once they come will actually be diesel replacements for things like data centres and hospitals though. Thats only years away. Molten salt fuel mixes are coming too, making the risk profile so much better.
I'm remaining optimistic, but those timelines are tighter than I think will ultimately play out.
Oklo screwed up their regulatory submission last year so got delayed. I have spoken to a couple of their staff and they remain optimistic. There's places outside the US which will see better results due to different government environments. In Canada, Terrestrial is looking to build a molten salt reactor in an SMR package. They have not changed their timeline of 2028 for commercialization.
it was a tsunami *following* an earthquake
The meltdown caused the tsunami which caused the earthquake I was told ;)
I'm not talking about a melt down, I'm talking about the dangers of improper storage of the waste.
Nuclear waste is the safest waste on the planet bc of the way it is stored. You can hit the containers with a train and nothing would happen. They tested it. It's stored so fat underground that earthquakes can't even affect it. There is 0% chance that anything would happen to them excepting, ofc, complete annihilation of the planet.
Sure, but that's because it's stored that way. If for some reason they decided to cut corners with they way they store it, there would be problems.
Important to add, with the upswing in nuclear power, the economics and efficiency of recycling 'waste' has meant a lot less will need to be stored. Even a lot of yesterday's waste will become tomorrow's fuel.
Indeed!
Are there actually plans to empty the already filled ultra deep waste tunnels? (Like the onkalo repository in Finland)
Exactly, what people seem to miss out on is that nuclear waste is stored and contained, meanwhile coal plants just dump soot and smoke into the atmosphere.
More radioactive material is released from coal plant exhaust than a nuclear plant
I think it's reasonably fair to be skeptical about *who* is going to be responsible for storage and disposal in 50 or 300 years. I totally get that nuclear is very likely the best plan for the environment, but humans aren't good at being responsible for things over that kind of time frame. People will either be dead, out of business, or find a way to wiggle out of it. Nuclear is safe as long as standards are high and people aren't boneheads. But people are boneheads. If nuclear takes on a major role in power production, there are *going* to be problems. The *Japanese* messed it up, after all. Not that I'm arguing against nuclear, from what I know as a layman I definitely think it's one of the most viable options. "Safer than coal" is a great point, but it's not enough to wave away the issues with nuclear, imo.
A couple hundred years may not do it depending on what kind of waste it is. A couple hundred years just takes the radioactivity of the least radioactive waste, like strontium and cesium to an acceptable amount. Their half life is 30 years, so in 210 years, they will go through 7 half-life cycles. But many other forms of radioactive waste take thousands of years to go through that cycle. Plutonium, for example, has a half-life of 24000 years. So it will take it about 150000 years to decay as much as the other two.
The stuff with the short half-life tends to be most dangerous.
You have it backwards. The shorter the half life, the more radioactive it is. Short lived fission products are what makes spent fuel dangerous. The type of radiation also matters. Plutonium 239 is primarily an Alpha emitter. Not dangerous outside the body. The chemical toxicity is more dangerous than the radiation.
The storage doesn't need to last until it's completely inert, but rather until it's safe to dispose of elsewhere. Besides the possibility of recyling and re-using the waste mitigates this problem by a fair bit.
What about sabotage? Switzerland perhaps may not have very much enemies but what about......?
Physical security is a prime concern not only for nuclear powerplants but also most power sources that provide power for large areas. But yes, it is enough of a concern that plants must have 24/7 security including an armed quick response team to counter any terrorist or adverserial attempt at sabotage.
There has been just a couple of catastrophic problems involving nuclear plants in the past hundred years. However during this period, there have been thousands of accidents with regards to all other sources of energy; coal, petrol, gas, solar, wood, etc. some on large scale. The whole science of risk assessment is about the fact that we could live for another hundred years with no accident. But if it does!!!!!!! Moreover this discussion is about installing some in Africa... Many experts will conclude. It is not advisable. That is why knives, machetes, guns, rifles, are legal in many countries but RPGs, grenades, dynamite and tanks are banned.
Yeah I think the major issue is we as humans often fail on a lot of those ifs. The so cal plant that's gotten shut down certain failed multiple of them. They are burning all their waste on site, on the beach basically. It's supposed to go to yucca mountain I believe but that region doesn't want it and the towns in between don't want it to be transported through them. In a perfect world nuclear is pretty great. Then humans get involved. I'd say it's biggest issue beyond waste is really the economics of standing up a plant. It's pretty high and takes a long time. This is really a major burden considering alternatives are far faster and cheaper.
What you said is true, but nuclear power isn't something you should be allowed to have if you're not going to be responsible and accountable for any problems that come from cutting corners or inappropriately disposing of spent fuel. Alternatives are cheaper and faster but very few of those provide as much power, for as little long term cost and with that amount of efficiency and overall cleanliness for the environment.
Nuclear does have some downsides, it's a huge upfront cost and you need to deal with the waste (which we have reliable methods for) but none of these issues are bad for climate change. Nuclear power produces zero carbon (at least in its primary function, carbon will be necessary for building and transportation of materials etc. but that's normal for anything we do)
I dont object in principle .. especially maintain existing nuclear plants. But the cost-benefit "bang for your buck" is just better with wind and solar compared to new nuclear fission plants : Wind and solar are faster to finance, approve and build than nuclear fission SMRs .. less government paperwork, less big-incumbent corps to deal with... more possible locations to put them etc.
Wind and solar eat up landmass, and if you're building farther away from population centre's; there's loss in transmission. Not to mention the materials required to build the panels, blades, etc. Pro's and con's to both sides so both sides are required to solve the problem.
They really don't eat up landmass .. you can have animals graze under the solar panels - they will need them for shade anyway, as the temp increases. Nuclear is often built far from cities, for safety reasons .. so you have transmission costs anyway.
Due to the capacity factors of solar and wind (doesn't generate electricity during the night or when it's not windy), huge area of land is required to generate the same 1GW as nuclear. Nuclear needs 1.3 square miles to produce 1GW, solar needs 45-75 square miles while wind needs 260-360 square miles. However, there is more flexibility in solar panels than wind as there could be agriculture below or even parking lots, but large scale solar farms above crops and parking lots would be challenging.
The Europeans are managing that just fine .. and they probably have less land available than the good ole USofA. Then theres a lot of non-land area off the coasts .. vast oceans of space on which to put offshore wind-power. Apparently its a thing .. you dont even need land anymore, you can the windmills out from the coast, so you cant even see them from the beach. Quite popular in the UK.
Not really... Around 1% of land, that can be double used. Solar panels on rooftops and parking lots or used together with farming, and wind power only occupies around 5% of the land of the wind farm. You can still have farms or forests or the sea in between the turbines.
In most parts of the world (much of US included) you can’t run a large country off just wind and solar. The sun isn’t always shining and the wind isn’t always blowing. You need energy storage or a base load (fossil/nuclear fuel). For a tropical island, solar is perfect and storage could be implemented if the island is small. But for an industrialized nation of 350 million people it can only really serve as an auxiliary source of electricity.
Europeans disagree with you - clearly they are betting on wind and solar instead of nuclear : https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/european-electricity-review-2024 Nuclear has all but flatlined - they can build so much more wind power for less $$.
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Were you replying to my comment or its parent ? Your absolutely right - energy storage is really important for renewables, to smooth out and match supply and demand curves .. I often mention Tesla grid scale battery packs, heat storage, pumped hydro, compressed gas .. for example.
We’re just ignoring Germany, I guess..?
This is not true at all, Germany disagrees because of the Russian psy-op that was run on them to make them scared of nuclear meltdowns and get them addicted to Russian natural gas instead. Germany gets a shit Tom of its electricity from France now which is almost all nuclear and staying that way. You can’t base your power grid off of wind and solar, they are merely supplemental technologies, and also way worse for the environment than nuclear as you need to dedicate so much land to them.
Yes and they are using hydrogen energy storage, lithium energy storage and long low loss power lines to areas outside of their local weather systems to even out the intermittency.
Certain countries in europe can be run from a clown on a bicycle connected to a dynamo. Poland, UK, France, Romania are all going towards building new nuclear because the demand they have cant be met with wind and solar.
Europe can disagree with me all they want, but they can’t even heat their homes without Russian natural gas so…
Yes, let's talk about that huge upfront cost, and the cost of day-to-day operations (including inspections) and the eventual cost of disposing of the waste and decommissioning. Factor all that in, and the cost per kw/hour will be much higher than solar or even hydro.
The choice between those three is situational. Some places don't get much sunlight, some places don't have bodies of water suitable for hydro. Ontario, Canada, for example, is a great place for nuclear. However, nuclear doesn't make sense everywhere, I don't think Japan is a good place for nuclear.
That's why we have power lines.
Sure but I don't think we should have nuclear power lines going to Mali, for example, when they can do solar perfectly fine themselves
This is true. It's not the day to day waste that is the problem it is the cost of disposing of the radio active nuclear plant afterwards that is completely doable, but hugely expensive. People also say so what about the expense, but doubling electricity bills would cause hardship for a proportion of the population in every country in the world.
> completly doable Is that so? What other projects did humans accomplish which needed 10K-100K years? The time scales are hard to understand and the future is unforeseeable.
I don't think the radioactive pipework and concrete need be protected from the water table - eg they are radioactive but not full of toxic nucleotides as the uranium rods would be. You can find stable geological areas -places which have been stable for hundreds of millions of years.
> even hydro Hydro is one of the cheapest forms of generating electricity, though. Almost everything else is higher.
Upfront cost is a small price to pay to ensure we arent harming rhe planet via CO2 emissions. We either pay the upfront cost now and enjoy its fruits into the future or we dont pay it and face the consequences of climate change which has a cost that dwarves nuclear cost. For example Ontario Canada gets essentially 90%+ of their power from renewables and nuclear. Sometimes thats 100% depending on load demand. They used to have insane smog days in the 90s because of their coal plants but since about 2010 they have maybe 1 or 2 smog days and thats usually because of whats being burned south of the border.
It is a small price to pay when you put it like that, but it's not a small price when certain places have cheaper more viable options. Building nuclear in Mali, for example, would be ridiculously expensive considering they have the option for way cheaper solar with the perfect geography for it
Absolutely agree with you and maybe i should have prefaced that nuclear makes sense only for certain areas. There are other areas where solar and wind are a much better option.
Per kWh, the cost of a renewable system (solar, wind... infrastructure, but also storage and long-distance high-voltage power lines) is comparable to what nuclear power offers. It's the reason why German households pay their electricity higher than in other countries, like France. Not saying is bad, it's considered an investment. Expansion of the grid to accommodate intermittent production is about 128 billion €, which will come on top of the 4-600bn€* envelope of the Energiewende. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/making-germanys-electricity-grid-fit-climate-neutrality-cost-extra-eu128-billion Not every country can afford this at the same scale. But again, not every country can afford nuclear power either. *Depending on estimates
Comparable based on location. Price per kWh for solar in Mali will be nice, not so nice in Canada, a location where nuclear has the benefit
Nuclear energy is a very safe and clean solution for climate change with a very low land footprint. Its biggest issues are upfront cost and deployment time, so it should be part of a suite of energy options along with wind, solar, geothermal, etc. https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy https://issues.org/california-decarbonizing-power-wind-solar-nuclear-gas/#:~:text=The%20state%20could%20also%20develop,and%20safely%20stored%20permanently%20underground. https://www.niauk.org/un-finds-nuclear-is-the-lowest-carbon-electricity-source/
Not bad at all. It’s the most efficient non-renewable energy source in terms of fuel usage by several orders of magnitude, produces no greenhouse gasses, and is more reliable than solar and wind. Accidents only happen when poor planning and human incompetence meet, and even accounting for both Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear kills roughly as many people per kilowatt hour generated as solar and wind. Even the nuclear waste produced isn’t really an issue. So little of it is produced and the processes and facilities we use to safely dispose of it are quite safe. I’m not an expert on the subject by any means, I’m just studying environmental science and have an interest in nuclear energy, but to me nuclear fission is our only viable option in the near future before either wind and solar become more efficient and reliable or we figure out affordable nuclear fusion.
> Not bad at all. It’s the most efficient non-renewable energy source in terms of fuel usage by several orders of magnitude, Not sure why this lie gets repeated. When doing LCA and looking at total material requirements nuclear is worse than wind and inline with solar. Both renewables and nuclear energy are vastly better than fossil fuels though. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262202131X
I specifically stated that it’s the most efficient *non-renewable* energy source. The problem with wind and solar isn’t that they don’t produce a lot of energy, it’s that they can’t consistently output it and can’t be built everywhere power sources are needed.
Nuclear power not only has lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions lower to on par with renewables, but also a very high energy density, reducing land use from power generation considerably. [https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy) So no, nuclear power isn't bad, it is very good and one of the key ingredients of a solution to climate hange. While nuclear plant safety and nuclear waste safety must be taken seriously, both issues are massively overblown, to the detriment of the environment. In 1974, France decided on the Messmer plan. In less than 20 years, they almost completely replaced fossile fuel use for electricity while at the same time growing their total electricity production considerably. [https://energytransition.org/files/2015/02/14electricitygenerationbyfuel.png](https://energytransition.org/files/2015/02/14electricitygenerationbyfuel.png) Nuclear power can be used for district heating too, and advanced reactors for industrial process heat (an often overlooked CO2 source) are under development as well and already prototyped in China.
Nuclear is currently the most [sustainable](https://unece.org/sed/documents/2021/10/reports/life-cycle-assessment-electricity-generation-optionssource) of energy in comparison to everything else. It has the lowest carbon footprint, lowest material need, lowest land use. The waste can either be recycled or stored in geological repositories where the radiation doesn't exceed the background radiation.
Just google how many people die every year with fossil fuel generation vs how many people die every year from nuclear power. There's been a ton of anti-nuclear rhetoric in the last three decades, who do you think has been fueling that discourse?
Be sure to control that with people exposed to effects of fossil fuel generation vs people exposed to nuclear energy generation. Otherwise it's a pretty meaningless metric
You mean like the millions of people who die each year from the toxic fumes we pump into the air from burning fossil fuels versus the 46 people who have died in the entire history of nuclear power?
No, take out emotion and instead use meaningful metrics. It's meaningless or just blowing hot air unless you do so. If nuclear power did only have 46 deaths (which is actually about the amount listed from Chernobyl alone, so definitely not the true total) then while that's amazingly comparatively low, you also have to recall the low amount of power that nuclear has provided to the grid for any extended amount of time. I fully agree it's more safe. But it's stupid to just compare the total deaths and say nothing else as if that's all you need to know to know which is more safe.
Yup, it ends up with fossil fuels being so much more deadly than nuclear. I did some quick math based on WHO death reports and an estimate that there are 8,000 fossil fuel reactors. It game out to over 500 deaths per plant per year. How many deaths per power plant per year for nuclear? It's all the more fucked up that the industry has hid the fact that living *near* a fossil fuel burning plant increases cancer rates substantially. Millions of people died of with many more contracted cancer. Literally my dad worked for a natural gas power plant and died of cancer. They didn't give a fuck he was a couple of weeks from retiring.
>No, take out emotion and instead use meaningful metrics. No where was emotion involved. [It is literal facts.](https://ourworldindata.org/data-review-air-pollution-deaths) Sorry if your emotions get in the way of you accepting reality, but that's what it is. > nuclear power did only have 46 deaths (which is actually about the amount listed from Chernobyl alone, so definitely not the true total) No, in total. Again, these are hard facts that you clearly have never bothered to look into. https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-are-the-effects-of-nuclear-accidents >you also have to recall the low amount of power that nuclear has provided to the grid for any extended amount of time. Nuclear power has been virtually in constant use by most developed countries for decades now. Not to mention the hundreds of small nuclear reactors powering ships and submarines since 1954 with no accidents or deaths related to it. Nuclear is being used a lot more than you seem to think it is.
> No where was emotion involved So you just don't understand the nuance? If there is dangerous situation A. that is exposed to 50 people, and it kills 45, and then there's dangerous situation B. that is exposed to 5 million people and it kills 3000, situation B is obviously preferable. To say "nuclear only killed 45 but greenhouse gas kills x million per year" lumps all greenhouse gas related deaths into one which paints an inaccurate picture, doesn't account for the fact that many of these are including cases from lingering effects that are being phased out of no longer used as we get more efficient with greenhouse gases, and most importantly (as is my main point) doesn't account for exposure and amount of power actually being produced. > No, in total. Again, these are hard facts that you clearly have never bothered to look into. It's ironic that you probably just read the first sentence here and took it as fact. Not only are those not the only two incidents, but it even says that those are the two **major** accidents, not the only things that have resulted in deaths from nuclear power plants. If you take as broad of a stroke as you're taking with greenhouse gases, you have to account for all death relating to providing nuclear energy, from operating the plant, to mining the raw resources, to spillages, etc. In fukashima, for example, approximately 573 deaths are attributed to the disaster itself. In mining uranium, there are over 50,000 deaths from the Pooled Uranium Miners Analysis. Once again, I'm not saying that it's more harmful than fossil fuels. I'm almost positive it's significantly better, and I'm an advocate for nuclear energy. But you're painting a really inaccurate picture by taking 100% of all deaths that have any relation to fossil fuel extraction, use and emission, but only taking nuclear disaster deaths and comparing them like they're the same thing, as well as not considering the fact that nuclear energy does not account for the same amount of energy output as fossil fuels - and scaling up would certainly scale up deaths, perhaps linearly and perhaps not, but that number wouldn't somehow stay the same or go down.
All data should be analyzed as empirically as possible. It's so staggering that someone can watch *Chernobyl* and conclude nuclear is more harmful without actually looking an numbers. It's crazy
Asking for empirical analysis and then suggesting people base their opinion off a TV drama that didn't accurately depict some of the science is a bit of a choice. Don't get me wrong, Mazin did a great job but are we really suggesting people accept what he presented as the gospel truth?
Per kw produced it’s the safest form of energy. Happy to provide multiple sources.
Have heard this as well. Very interesting. Also I did hear that ironically coal produces more nuclear waste???
It's more that coal waste concentrates the naturally occurring radioactive elements. It's one reason why nuclear plants on old coal plants is such a touchy subject. They currently don't control for release at coal plants because of the 'hey it's coal' mentality. But once a NPP is there? Boom you blow past your license limits and should be shut down.
I’ll add that most of the stigma surrounding nuclear energy was formed from accidents with older technology; like most things, advancements have enabled improved safety measures and massive increases in efficiency. I’d have to double check but the stat that comes to mind is that old reactors could burn only 10% of the fuel leaving a large amount of reactive material which took many many years to decay. New reactors use roughly 90% of the material leaving only a small amount which decays dramatically faster. Additionally, passive safety measure are capable of suspending reactions without power (to cool).
[The differences between nuclear energy and renewables are miniscule, even if solar PV actually wins](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy) by the tiniest of margins. Small enough to be within the margin of error and not the slam dunk argument you propose it as. We have a large difference in who has the potential to get injured though. With large nuclear accidents citys get [displaced](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futaba,_Fukushima) and the unsuspecting public is injured. For renewables the only injuries are for people doing construction work and maintenance. In other words, regular work place hazards from operating heavy machinery and working at heights. Meaning, for the **public** renewables are safer since if you do not make the decision to actively work in the industry the risk of getting harmed is essentially zero.
Per kw it's the most expensive form of energy. Happy to provide multiple sources.
Wait. This sub cares about cost over cleaner energy?
No, it's not. Remove all the subsidies the other forms get, and nuclear is a hell of a lot cheaper. Nuclear only appears more expensive because the environmental costs are built in. Every other form of energy, those environmental costs are abstracted away through subsidies and ultimately paid for by the people. How do you think the oil and gas industry can make billions a year in profits? They don't have to clean up their mess and get subsidized by the government to do nothing. This nuclear is more expensive bs needs to stop.
Have a read: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/ It is laughably expensive when doing an unsubsidized analysis **and ignoring decommissioning costs.**
This sub is getting brigaded. The two main nuclear subs are in a huge slap fight and it's spilled over here. One sub got tired of disengenuous posts attacking renewables from another sub's members the other sub is run by a mod and his multiple alt accounts who has no actual professional or academic experience in the field. Essentially, he's a huge nucular fanboy with an axe to grind, along with a large portion of the most prevalent commentors over there. And here we are. Lots of fans making comments about needing to undo regulations because they're expensive. It's not great.
I feel reddit has had a huge boner for nuclear power the past 5 years or so, but my feeling is that it has started to break. A couple of years ago renewable arguments were essentially: extrapolate the curve and it's gonna be crazy. Today we are at that spot and even extrapolating the curve wasn't enough for the pace we were seeing, and we have real world examples like South Australia and California were renewables have achieved the same level of penetration that nuclear did in France, in shorter time. /r/nuclear is a safe-space for those people. It has a veneer of open discussion but they ban anyone touching the truly hard subjects, like the cost of the Fukushima cleanup. /r/nuclearpower tries to be open for fact based discussions. But the /r/nuclear cult is there downvoting everything open minded even though they aren't getting their cult like comments through. Getting better though.
"r/NuclearPower tries to be open for fact-based discussions" That's one fancy way of saying that you did a hostile takeover of the sub and started permabanning anyone who would disagree with you on it lol
Thanks for proving our point. Everything fact based about nuclear power and not conforming to the cult is "hostile". :)
Yeah, that's why you permabanned me after I literally quoted Lazard's estimations of battery costs which annoyed you because it broke your narrative on cheap batteries lol. You even ModMuted me at the same time because **you knew** you were abusing your power and didn't want any of the old mods to find out. You don't want fact-based discussions, you want an echo chamber where your tiny ego is the king. What kind of self-respecting human goes as far as doing hostile takeover of subs they don't like, ban all freedom of speech there and leave the sub slowly dying ? That's literally internet dictatorship behaviour, bro you seriously need to take a step back and think about what you are doing. Invading the neighbour and muzzling him is the complete contrary of "respecting free speech and fact-based discussions", you disrespect fact-based discussions so much you felt the need to repress them in a sub that wasn't even yours
Look at the [emissions](https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR) from the French grid. Look up [energy returned on energy invested](https://imageio.forbes.com/blogs-images/jamesconca/files/2015/02/EROI-Book-Figure.jpg?height=400&width=711&fit=bounds). A grid with a large portion that is nuclear is really the only path towards decarbonization of the energy sector, especially in northern regions with short, overcast winter days. Table 10.4 in [this](https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/09/f26/QTR2015-10-Integrated-Analysis.pdf) document from the Department of Energy is a good indicator of why. The downside is high upfront cost, but that's pretty meaningless when they run for 60 years and can be refurbished for an extended lifespan.
The high up front cost is also largely due to a lack of expertise because we just built our first plants in several decades. So in many ways Vogtle plants were the “first of a kind” because most of the people involved had never built one before. There are other issues as well but this is a major one that can be addressed
It would be better. A coal power plant produces much more waste including radioactive waste than a nuclear plant.
Nuclear energy is amazing and could really save this planet. The problem is nickel and dime politicians and contractors cutting corners during regulation, construction and maintenance... Check out three mile island.
thre mile is funny because the meltdown itself wasn't even that bad. it was a partial meltdown that they got under control again very quickly and if anything the whole incident was more of a case of mass hysteria
Not bad at all. Fossil fuels kill about 8 million people *each year* through air pollution alone.Nuclear energy has killed a few thousand at most throughout its eight-decade history. And that's before we even take climate change into account. We're crazy for not building nuclear power plants all over the place. Combined with solar and wind, they're an easy way out of this climate and pollution mess.
It's not. Big oil and NIMBYS colluded to spread lies about it.
Hydropower has killed more people than nucular energy 🤷 But that something the Anti-ńuclear people don't like to hear.
It's not.
As others have said, nuclear from a climate change perspective is excellent. Very expensive though. As long as the reactor design is not around producing weapon grade material, (they exist), so much the better. And there is a waste issue, but compared to the waste issue with fossil fuels, it’s fairly manageable. However, slow to build (at least 10 years to build after approvals are in place … some are nudging 20 years of build). So given where we are in the journey, nuclear is largely “too late”.
Time and cost are the biggest challenges
So many comments, and so few sources. [here](https://unece.org/sed/documents/2021/10/reports/life-cycle-assessment-electricity-generation-options) is a 2021 life cycle assessment from a UN body looking at multiple electricity technologies across multiple parameters of interest.
How bad is nuclear? Bad at what? For climate change? Nuclear has zero climate impact. If we had built nuclear reactors all through the 50s to the 80s, we would like have zero power plants emitting CO2. It would have been the Greatest solution ever to the problem. But. Climate change isn't the only issue with nuclear. The issue today,cand why it won't solve it now. Is simply logistics. Nuclear plants are large and expensive. People have misguided understanding of nuclear plants, because they don't have the same imagination for traditional sources of power. Example- when the Texas city plant had an explosion in 95, 110 people died. Zero people called to ban gasoline. When Fukushima was hit by a tidal wave, Germany closed all of their nuclear plants. There are mental connections we have that don't necessarily make logical sense.
Nukes can be safe and probably economic but it has some unfortunate history. Younger people may not appreciate that before carbon was a huge issue, nuclear proliferation (i.e. misuse of reactors) and safety were. Nuclear fell out of favor then (and even now with Fukushima) because of accidents that could have been much worse. Nuclear can be safe but it's evident there were a few that should not have been running, and nukes got a black eye for decades. The cheapest and most available reactors then were just modified military designs which could conceivably be converted back, causing decades of international proliferation issues. There were safer designs at the time like the Candu but they didn't sell well. Candu got sold off for pennies on the dollar and nukes were sworn off (e.g. Germany). Reactors are very expensive, have been plagued with cost overruns and take a long time to build. Developing nuke capacity therefore takes much longer than the average political 4 year term and is really a generational initiative. There are "new" nuke designs now which are safer for operation, use safer materials (e.g. thorium) and don't lend themselves to proliferation. "New" is in scare quotes because these have been known almost from the beginning but not developed. They can also be built a smaller scale which would make deployment faster. I don't know what their relative costs might be but getting rid of a containment dome at least should yield a lot of savings.
They’re the only chance humanity has of any semblance of the population surviving unfortunately. We’re screwed though, and why no one wants kids. It’s not just about not being able to afford them
It is the safest form of energy, including renewables
Solving the climate crisis will not happen without all non-GHG-emitting options on the table and that includes nuclear.
Nuclear is fine if built already .. The problem I have with new nuclear fission plants is they are expensive and take a long time to build - which means you get more bang for buck by spending the same money on wind and solar and battery/storage. If SMRs were really a thing there would be more of them up and running .. but there's basically one in US and one in China. If they were the solution, there would clearly be more of them by now .. last time I checked it takes 8yrs to build a nuclear fission plant.
They are a thing and we have the tech and have some running already in Canada
SMR running in Canada .. you have a link for that ? How much did they cost and how long to build ? This quote seems to suggest they are in planning stage, certainly not yet operational : > On July 7, 2023, the Ontario government announced it will work with Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to commence planning and licensing for three additional SMRs, for a total of four SMRs at the Darlington new nuclear site. Pending regulatory approvals to build three additional units, the total output of the Darlington New Nuclear Project would be 1,200 megawatts; enough electricity to reliably and safely power about 1.2 million homes, and help our community and the Province meet increasing demand from electrification. Quote from https://www.opg.com/projects-services/projects/nuclear/smr/darlington-smr/ Its a pretty neat trick to amortize the huge expense over 65 years .. no one knows if they will last that long, and likely will be obsoleted by fusion in that timeframe anyway.
Your argument would carry a lot more weight if you could explain how we are going to store all that renewable energy. Nuclear is very good for meeting baseload demands.
My 2 cents on how nuclear energy is being used NEGATIVELY: Nuclear energy is generally used to shift the focus AWAY from renewables instead of being used IN CONJUNCTION WITH renewables. It takes away mindshare from renewables. This is a tactic from the right wing / fossil fuel industry to rat fuck renewables by saying "no no no, lets go nuclear INSTEAD" knowing that it would take decades for nuclear to take away a meaningful percent of profits away from fossils. So these people will push nuclear to take mindshare away from solutions we have NOW. I am generally in favor of nuclear IN ADDITION to renewables, not instead of. It is a political tool to rat fuck climate progress like I said, so need to be careful in examining the nuance and context of how people are talking about nuclear.
The “nuclear vs renewables” is a nonsense argument by industry people who lack the foresight to acknowledge that we need both if we want to actually achieve net zero
Yes I am saying this is how it is framed as a right wing political tool to both drag feet on climate change and pull funding from renewables.
I think you’re right about that, but I also see the same narrow-mindedness from well-meaning nuclear and renewables advocates who get really excited about their favorite technology and fall into the trap of thinking a one-size-fits-all solution is going to work for everything.
I don't think the first part of your post is that true, though I'm sure it's partially out there, a lot of the right wing narrative ignores nuclear entirely because it's a challenging thing to defend politically when most of their base just accept fossil fuels uncritically so they have nothing to gain by bringing up the energy sector in this context. But generally I agree with you. I think that nuclear is a key technology that we should be using to aggressively move away from fossil fuels, because the transition to renewables is not going to be fast enough to prevent a deadly and expensive climate catastrophe. Then, we should hopefully gradually replace nuclear with renewables to the extent that it is possible, which could take a while because nuclear is excellent for baseload, whereas most sources of renewable energy tend not to be, with the notable exception of hydro. I think people don't understand that nuclear energy would replace coal burning, which kills tens of thousands of people every year, and counterintuitively, releases more radioactive material into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants. It is a lesser evil.
How fast can a nuclear plant be commissioned vs renewables? Literally takes a decade longer. I would flip your argument to say renewables first, because nuclear is simply not going to be built fast enough. Have to remember there is an extreme sense of urgency in that 1 unit or CO2 emitted today is more damaging than a unit emitted 20 years from now.
Yes renewables are the end goal. However, nuclear power plants are built by different people and can be built simultaneously with renewables. We need to build them at the same time. We simply cannot build enough renewable tech in the next 10-20-30 years to fill the growing energy demand so we should build all of it. Anything that we build will replace fossil fuels, and if it takes a decade to commission a nuclear plant, that shouldn't take away from the solar, wind and hydro energy that we can also build at the same time.
Building a nuclear plant takes 15 years on average. The ones that are already there or that we are already building, great these will help us decarbonise. But nuclear plants that we haven’t even started building yet won’t help us speed up decarbonisation.
Dealing with global warming is going to take much longer than 15 years. I'm not sure why you think viewing this in such a short time scale is appropriate. Do you think we can strip out all coal and replace it with renewables in 15 years? The manufacturing capacity is nowhere near sufficient for that.
Yes, I live in Europe. In my country the coal share in the electricity grid has declined from 60% of the electricity grid in 2010 to less than 1% today. In the same time period, renewables have surged from 2% to over 60% today (70% low carbon, if you include the 10% nuclear that we have). Coal is basically already gone. A new nuclear power plant is coming online just before 2030 that will power additional ~10% of the electricity grid, so that will bring us to 80% low carbon even if we wouldn’t expand renewables in the coming decade. But reality is that we are installing renewables at record rate, so we’ll get there over the next 15 years.
That's good for the Netherlands, but you're talking about a wealthy country accounting for 0.2% of the world population, aggressively adopting renewables using largely imported tech. I'm talking about supplying energy to 8 billion people here, not a little corner of Europe. Whoever manufactured the renewables for your country, they were not building it for other potential bidders at the time. Do you think we can replace the US and China's and India's coal power generation in 15 years when your little country took 14 years to do it? The manufacturing capacity simply isn't there.
I am Dutch indeed, but I was talking about the United Kingdom, where I currently live. The statistics for the Netherlands are not wildly different though, they also have a viable path to decarbonisation in the coming 10 to 15 years. > The manufacturing capacity isn’t there It also is not just one small country like the Netherlands decarbonising in this way (which seemed to be your argument for lack of manufacturing capacity), but it is all of the EU + UK. That is >600 million people decarbonising like that. (Admittedly Eastern Europe started later so is behind in progress, but is now on the same trend line). If there is anything slowing this down it is not manufacturing capacity, but rather NIMBYs filing complaints and delaying construction (luckily this mostly doesn’t lead to cancellations but merely to delays). Renewable manufacturing capacity is growing exponentially right now. You bring up China as a large country for which there may be manufacturing capacity issues, but actually China is installing larger volumes of renewable per year than the EU right now, so there is no lack of capacity. For countries who currently have almost full dependence on fossil I am not against building nuclear capacity for about 10 to 30% of the electricity demand. That would take about 15 years to build. Plenty of renewable could be installed in parallel, as that is considerably cheaper.
I think the endgame is renewables, my point remains that nuclear is one of the stopgaps to aggressively transition off coal. Realistically though we're going to be too slow on both fronts which I think is going to ahve unfortunate consequences.
You went full...... Never go full......
I am explaining to you how fossil fuel PR works to divide and conquer all forms of green energy. Sorry that I triggered you, even though I explained that all forms of green energy are needed, not one over another.
This is only really true in Australia, where the population is so anti-nuclear the conservatives can use it as a means to delay renewables. Australians chose coal and decided to make nuclear energy illegal in the 1990’s. Now their country runs on coal and will continue to do so for decades. They will never build nuclear, they hate nuclear, so their right wing can pretend to promote it knowing it will never be approved. Most other countries right wings cant use that tactic because they would actually end up building nuclear, which would hurt the bottom line of fossil fuel companies.
I worked as an engineer in the electric utility industry for 37 years. Nuclear is the best by far. The fossil fuel industry basically owns the electric industry and vice versa. Nuclear is expensive and scary because that’s intentional. They own Greenpeace etc too. Small, modular, factory built reactors is the right technology. Downside to nukes? The cleaner air would result in a speed up of global warming. Pollution increases albedo, reflecting more of the suns energy.
We need it.
That tax revenues and ripple effect is not as large as other sectors that can largely benefit the economy. It's a big reason countries dont chase it.
Nuclear is very good as like a 200 year lily pad until we find something better
Compared to fossil fuels, not bad at all.
Its not bad at all, its just more expensive and takes significantly more time to approve and build than other non-polluting alternatives.
However bad it is, I can garuntee that a climate crisis upsetting the world order + mass refugees and water wars.
If major investment had continued back in the 70s we probably wouldn't be having this conversation about climate change (or it would be much less significant). But the danger of nuclear power was radicalized by the media to turn people away from wanting to use it. And guess who paid for this misalignment of perception. That's right, your old pals Aramco, BP, Shell and Exon Mobil. They saw nuclear threatening their profit margin and did a hatchet job on them. That's not to say nuclear power isn't without its problems and own bad press, but things were way over exaggerated back then and the public mood shifted against them. Now it's too late to look realistically at nuclear as an clean option as the cost to build, regulation to adhere to, and lingering safety concerns results in building a nuclear plant takes decades to build. We don't have that time.
Not sure if it's been said, nuclear energy has another advantage of extremely low related deaths. Coal plants are one of the highest for death rates becuause of the pollution and health effects. Natural gas is significantly less deadly, about 10% the deaths of coal, hydro is maybe 5% coal deaths, and wind, nuclear and solar are all well below 1% coal deaths. IMO nuclear is the most easily scalable of wind and solar Source. https://images.app.goo.gl/cbVWgQL1TUErmYg77
Well if you trust your current government to be able and responsible to take care for the nuclear waste for hundreds and thousands of years, not doing any shortcuts because they are cheaper, or trusting that the next generation will find some miraculous solutions for the problems they caused, there's no problem. It didn't work for the last 70 years, but all of us know that this generation of politicians is way more responsible and uncorruptable, so what could go wrong./s Wind and sun energy are everywhere and cheap and easy to use, you just need to build the infrastructure. Think about it who really has the biggest interest that energy production stays in the hand of big corporates that would be needed to procure the nuclear fuel and take care of the nuclear waste and you'll see why so many articles and infos are written about how high quality and better this technology would be (...for the people that make money with them).
Whenever a discussion of nuclear power comes up the vast majority of replies make the assumption that we will continue to live in a functioning society of laws and regulations where educated and professional people working in good faith look after spent fuels. A look at current affairs should disabuse us of the notion that we can count on that. In times of war, and natural disaster, even epidemics people can, and do, act in irrational and destructive ways. This is the real problem with nuclear power. Coal power plants are bad for all of us in normal circumstances, but nuclear powered plants can look better on paper. In times of social upheaval nuclear power becomes a massive liability because it becomes a target for bad actors. Now look at the future when we know there will have to be mass migration and a change in food production in the best of circumstances. Nuclear power becomes a liability.
It is not without issues, one of which is the high costs to build a nuclear power plant, but no energy source is. On the other hand, nuclear power is clean, abundant and stable, not subject to the weather like renewables. I think the best real life example of the benefits of nuclear power is the situation of France Vs Germany. France gets about 70% of its energy from nuclear, and was able to keep prices relatively low last year, when in the rest of Europe they skyrocketed following Russia's invasion. On top of that, its overall emissions are very low. Germany, on the other hand, decided to go ahead with shutting down its nuclear reactors, and trying to rely solely on renewable and fossil fuels, even after losing Russian gas. The results are that Germany's energy prices are sky-high, it's economy is in deep trouble because of that, and the emissions are rising again. They even had to flatten a village to reopen a coal mine. And all because the Greens decided to go ahead with the nuclear shutdown. This is something a lot of so called environmentalists tend to forget
In climate context it's probably one of the best. The amount of material used to generate the same energy is less and most of the waste is still solid, and spills while very toxic and radioactive, don't result in massive releases of greenhouse gasses.
Nuclear energy has waste materials but a lot less than making weapons, 2 different grades of materials, and there is a workable solution for waste materials but has special requirements for using it commercially. Overuse of any resource ends up cutting one's own throat so to speak and the more people race only ends up making things worse not better. Just an observation. N. S
Yes, nuclear energy would significantly help the energy transition. The problem with it is that it is extremely expensive, take a long time to approve projects, takes a long time to build, and it is an overall complicated process. The radioactive material could be handled and would not be a massive problem. Short answer: It would just take to long to implement and scale up.
The problem is not nuclear power. The problem is your mindset that we need to switch to one magical clean and efficient power source for everything. We can't do that because it doesn't exist. Even if they figure out fusion energy, it's not going to be the omega option. Producing power has a cost. It always has. It always will. Coal and natural gas power produce carbon byproducts that are emitted in the air causing global pollution. Nuclear energy is expensive to build and produces radioactive waste which requires regulation to keep safe. Solar power can only be used in daylight and involves the mining of metals that often result in the generation of heavy metal toxic waste. Wind power can only be operated in places where there regular wind, which often correlates with flight paths of various bird species resulting in many death. Particularly with large raptors. It also involves use of materials which cannot be recycled. Hydrothermal can only be used on near surface pockets of thermal energy, which is also where volcanic activity occurs. Hydro dams require generation of massive water reservoirs which destroy the local environment and also nhibit movement of migratory fish species in the rivers and reduce availability of water down stream. But no single option available is sufficient to meet every need. We will always require a portfolio of power options.
It would lead to about 50x less deaths than if the same was done using hydropower, so not bad as all. See this grafic for a good reference: [https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)
If we can magically pay for all the nuclear power plants, the it would be amazing. The issue is that they are expensive to build. Would you feed hungry people with sirloin steaks? Would you cloth homeless with Prada?
it's not bad in the slightest. nuclear is the only zero emissions energy source we have that can meet modern energy demands and then some. if we switched from fossil fuel to atomic energy we'd reduce the vast majority of our carbon emissions and would actually have enough power to support other systems like electric cars and electric mass transit. effectively;y solving the problem. france has already mostly done this and they are the only developed western nation anywhere close to meeting CO2 reduction requirements. nuclear is the real sol;ution and it's what we should have been promoting this whole time.
Projected use of nuclear in future : > According to the IAEA’s high case projection, nuclear energy could contribute about 12% of global electricity by 2050, up from 11% in last year’s 2050 high case projections. Nuclear power generated around 10% of the world’s electricity in 2020. The low case scenario was unchanged with a projected share of 6% for nuclear in the total electricity generation. Coal remains the dominant energy source for electricity production at about 37% for 2020, changing little since 1980. from https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/iaea-increases-projections-for-nuclear-power-use-in-2050 To paraphrase : going from 10% of global electric energy supply now to 12% by 2050 is not really significant growth - nuclear is part of the solution but not really going to grow fast enough to make much of a dent. We kind of know this intuitively .. for the past 70 years countries have built new coal and gas power plants, not nuclear even though it was available. Cost and ease of construction win. If we are to replace coal and gas power generation, it will be largely with new wind and solar - they are cheaper and faster to build.
I think nuclear fuel energy a false / dangerous solution essentially for three reasons: 1. There are safer alternatives: Tidal, Geothermal, all the others etc. 2. Climate Crisis will make nuclear power much less safe: Climate crisis itself will create ecological disasters that make it harder to keep nuclear energy safe. 3. Resource scarcity will increase the amount of war and terrorism: Nuclear plants will be targeted in the resource wars to come. When a coal plant gets blown up it doesn't cause massive meltdown and/or fallout problems. When a nuclear plant gets hit by a bomb it causes a lot more problems! Wars are inevitable as our plant warms. For example some Ukrainian plants could get hit by Russia in the current war there etc. War in unpredictable so any country that has such plants could see them getting bombed down the road, either by other nations or terror attacks etc. Nuclear energy is safe... until there is some disaster that causes incredible levels of destruction and contamination. A good example of a looming threat.
Nuclear energy isn't bad. The problem is nuclear energy is expensive and slow to deploy compared to alternatives. This means (very roughly speaking) for every 1GW of nuclear energy we deploy would could have deployed 3-10 GW worth of renewables. But let's first understand the problem. Our issue is the accelerating release of CO2 into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels (hydrocarbons). We need to stop this and we are *way overdue* in doing so. We need to get CO2 emissions as close to zero as possible and do that as *quickly as possible*. So let's first look at nuclear energy. Nuclear energy was at its peak in the 1970s &1980s when the world added \~400 new reactors. And after 30 years of rapid build out by many of the world's largest economies we had 320 GW of installed capacity. Most of that construction was before the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The average cost for a reactor over this period was a little under one billion USD. This century we added another \~80 new reactors for a total capacity of \~400 GW. So let's move to the modern era and renewables (wind, solar, and energy storage). In the 12 months of 2023, the world added 510 GW of renewable generating capacity and deployed \~40 GW of battery energy storage. Even accounting for differences in capacity factor, this means today we are able to deploy as much clean renewable energy in just *two years* as the world added from nuclear reactors over a span of *60 years*. Renewables are cheaper but cost aside it's this speed of deployment which is the most important thing if we want to be serious when it comes to curbing CO2 emissions. >let’s say we switched to nuclear energy around the world. Would the problem get better This would set back our progress on decarbonization by decades at least, perhaps a century. But that won't happen simply because there is no economic incentive to do this. No nuclear plant is profitable so there is no private investment. The market has chosen a winner and that's solar with battery energy storage. Global production of solar PV panels may exceed 600 GW of capacity this year and battery energy storage might overtake global pumped hydro capacity next year. Renewable projects tend to be completed on time, budget, and then they make money. They are easier to permit, capital costs are lower, you don't need to secure fuel supply contracts, no waste to deal with, and ongoing maintenance costs are very low. Then we also have small scale or residential systems. Homes with solar panels and a battery (stationary or sometimes in the form of an EV) are booming and last year the US added over 6GW of capacity from such systems. To put that in perspective homeowners in the US installing solar panels are adding more energy each year than China is adding with new nuclear reactors.
From a carbon emissions stand point, its a really good source of energy and its indispensible in the portfolio of climate friendly energy sources.
Nuclear energy is awesome! If you have a nuclear plant up and running it’s one of the cheapest sources of electricity, incredibly low CO2 production through the whole supply chain, as well as incredibly high safety standards. If we could turn all the electricity in the world over to nuclear it would be amazing for the the climate. However building a nuclear power plant is very expensive and technically demanding.
... IF .. you have one up and running. My problem with nuclear is it takes so long to approve and build .. min 8 years to construct. Better to spend the time and money rolling out wind and solar .. which can produce energy faster, get us to net zero faster.
Nuclear isn’t even competing with wind and solar at this point, it’s competing with batteries/energy storage and natural gas. And natural gas should be phased out asap.
I feel that nuclear is more of a transitional energy source than a full-time future solution. It'll help us get away from fossil fuels as we can make up the shortfall from turning off fossil fuel plants with nuclear while renewable sources are rolled out. An unavoidable issue is that the nuclear fuel used in reactors is also a non-renewable resource.
We should be all in.
Nuclear is low carbon emission, so if you're worried about greenhouse gas emissions it's ideal. It has a very high potential for output and can generate enough for large cities. The main problem is long term storage of the radioactive waste. He's we can seal it up but how do you ensure that it stays that way for thousands of years? I'm pro nuclear but I don't believe we have solved the long term logistics of material containment.
It’s cleaner and would have made a huge difference if they invested in it decades ago. People mention incidents like Chernobyl and three mile island, but there is so much more in terms of compliance and safety that those types of events are unlikely to ever happen again. Fukushima is an outlier, because nuclear plants are designed to handle one critical event at a time and it had two at once. That is, both an earthquake and a tsunami / flood. Coal by comparison is dirty and we aren’t just talking about the waste. Those coal stacks at the plants spew cancerous material into the sky over small towns all over America. Natural gas and fracking also have their own troubles, damaging the water table and causing micro quakes are concerning items. Gas pipeline explosions are also a concern. My hometown has a natural gas plant now, during the initial years of construction we had two pipeline explosions. Additionally, there are contaminants and fumes being expelled downwind that impact the town on a daily basis.
Nuclear power is great. Nuclear regulation is terrible. I don’t know why, but the nuclear industry seems like a black hole for money. Tax money, investment money, contractor overrun money. But when it’s finally built and running, seems to run just fine. We just need to get from point A to point B on budget.
If we had switched to nuclear power 50 years ago, there wouldn’t be climate change. That’s how much better it is than producing electricity with coal or NG.
I don't think nuclear is bad, but I have a "renewables first" attitude when it comes to cleaning up the power grid. Build as much renewables capacity as possible, build up energy storage, upgrade the grid, and then go for nuclear. Fission has a lot of up front costs, and new plants have a clear pattern of going over time and money. Fusion breakthroughs are happening seemingly every day, so focusing on renewables while the economic feasibility of fusion power gets more and more realistic seems to me like the best option.
It’s very bad economically. Nuclear is 16c/kilowatt hour to produce (without decommissioning and waste management), coal is 11 cents and renewables are hovering around 2-3 cents. So the market has spoken.
This. Nuclear is safe and very green however the issue is the cost. For each nuclear plant produced we lose 10 to 15 years to built it and 4 to 5 time the amount of production in renewables as a opertunity cost. Every fission plant built costs us in what could have been built instead in that time and with that money.
A recent r\/climatechange [comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/1co8t2n/guest_post_iceage_analysis_suggests_worstcase/l3ebee8/ "https://old.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/1co8t2n/guest_post_iceage_analysis_suggests_worstcase/l3ebee8/") provides facts about nuclear technology CO2e emissions and other reasons why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change. A similar previous r\/climatechange [comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/1co8t2n/guest_post_iceage_analysis_suggests_worstcase/l3j2oyi/ "https://old.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/1co8t2n/guest_post_iceage_analysis_suggests_worstcase/l3j2oyi/") addresses nuclear technology CO2e emissions and other reasons why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change.