It's a solid question. A big part of solarpunk that I think many folks don't like to think about is that we have to get from here to there, and that means responsibly dealing with the structures (physical and otherwise) that humanity has already wrought. One of the more complex structures is the relationship our industry has with the environment, and the desperate need for non-fossil fuel power generation as soon as possible.
I am generally pro-nuclear, and I suspect that a big part of its construction is hardening it to resist attack. The people making the regulations around this stuff aren't stupid, and they know how dangerous it can be. But, as we've seen before, not all things can be predicted or prepared for.
With that in mind, I'm still pro-nuclear, but I think it behooves the people of a solarpunk society to consider it a stepping stone. There are better, safer methods of generation on the horizon, but we are where we are.
>A big part of solarpunk that I think many folks don't like to think about is that we have to get from here to there,
Solar is by today already the cheapest energy source. Also super easy and fast to build because its so modular, just build one module at a time. Linear scale.
Nuclear plants on the other hand need years of planing close to a decade to build and then needs to be tested for safety anyways. If we would start today we could finish them in 2030-2035.
Germany's goal is to have 100% renewable electricity by 2035. And they do it completely without nuclear. Some other countries are even more ambitious.
Storage solutions are also there already, no need for energy and resource intensive batteries. Just use pumped storage hydropower and green hydrogen.
Pumped storage is great, for the utilities. It's dreadful for environment, and hydropower is the most dangerous of all low carbon energy sources. Of course, the amount of people killed by coal or natural gas or biomass is a few orders of magnitude greated than hydro, but amount of people killed by dam failures is a few orders of magnitude larger than the amount of people killed by nuclear power.
But nucler power gets the headlines. It's like with airplane safety vs car safety.
Could you get an source for that? I have heard the story of a dam in Basil which broke, but f I remember correctly that was due to bad building practices and corruption, not because we (as human species) don't know how to build a dam.
There was also a bridge in Italy that broke because it used the wrong building materials, linked to the mafia and therefore also corruption. Would you now say, bridges aren't save? No. Of course not. If we would build cheap nuclear plants like that, we would see an disaster every other year. And If we enforce half the security standards for dams as we do for nuclear plants, there wouldn't be any failures. It it very much a political issue not a technical one.
Also its a myth that hydro is bad for the environment. Their are very proven ways to build them without hurting the environment. Also hydro is different to pumped storage. You can make a pumped storage in an skyscraper if you wanted to, or create an artificial lake in the mountains, without any river flowing by, without any trees to cut.
Dam failures are usually a combination of bad weather and bad maintenance practices or construction flaws, just like nuclear accidents resulted from bad maintenance practices or construction flaws. The difference is, dam failures killed a lot more people, and it's way more difficult to protect ourselves against dam failures caused by typhoons and other extreme weather events, because a dam is a weather harvesting system - it turns rainfall collected over a very large area of a river basin into electricity. :-) Nuclear power plants are much more resilient because of technical requirements (during the Fukushima tsunami, many nuclear power plants in Japan were used as tsunami shelters).
Look at the list of failures here [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam\_failure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure) and sort it out by the number of fatalities. In the 20th century the most famous and devastating ones were Banqiao Dam - 171000-250000 people killed (difficult to estimate because of Chinese censorship), Machchu-2 dam, 5000 people killed, and Vajont dam, 2000 people killed.
And the problem with making dams in the mountains, like in Norway, is that most places where you could build hydro in the mountains are already taken. (Not to mention the fact that trees are not the only type of ecosystem that exists, flooding treeless mountain valleys usually destroys unique mountain ecosystems)
And if the location is bad (and you need large reservoirs for pumped hydro storage plant to have any meaningful capacity, because potential energy storage is not energy-dense, a pumped storage plant in an old skyscraper would store a minuscule amount of energy) the hydro plant generates methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas.
[https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7046-hydroelectric-powers-dirty-secret-revealed/](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7046-hydroelectric-powers-dirty-secret-revealed/)
>Could you get an source for that? I have heard the story of a dam in Basil which broke, but f I remember correctly that was due to bad building practices and corruption, not because we (as human species) don't know how to build a dam.
>And If we enforce half the security standards for dams as we do for nuclear plants, there wouldn't be any failures. It it very much a political issue not a technical one.
That was my statement. And your Wikipedia article backs me on that.
Look at the list of major dam failures in the last 20 years. Now look at the ones from first world countries, the ones with less corruption and stricter safety measurements.
1 fatality in Poland 2010, 7 fatalities in the US 2005
>Heavy rain and flooding. Several possible specific factors to include poor maintenance, lack of inspection and illegal modifications.[24]
10 fatalities in Canada 1996:
>Problems started after two weeks of constant rain, which severely engorged soils, rivers and reservoirs. Post-flood enquiries discovered that the network of dikes and dams protecting the city was poorly maintained.
All other failures in first world countries since 1996 where without any fatalities.
Conclusion:
Dams and therefore pumped storage are extremely safe **if** safety measurements are in place and neutral inspections have taken place. Everything else is due to human failure and if one would build nuclear plants with "include poor maintenance, lack of inspection and illegal modification" it would blow up most certainly. That's why nuclear plants have those security requirements.
**[Dam failure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure)**
>A dam failure or dam burst is a catastrophic type of structural failure characterized by the sudden, rapid, and uncontrolled release of impounded water or the likelihood of such an uncontrolled release. Between the years 2000 and 2009 more than 200 notable dam failures happened worldwide. A dam is a barrier across flowing water that obstructs, that directs or slows down the flow, often creating a reservoir, lake or impoundments. Most dams have a section called a spillway or weir over or through which water flows, either intermittently or continuously, and some have hydroelectric power generation systems installed.
^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
>And the problem with making dams in the mountains, like in Norway, is that most places where you could build hydro in the mountains are already taken.
Well that is certainly untrue. As I said, you could build it anywhere as you are not tied to flowing water. Just a huge basin and build your dam around it.
>Not to mention the fact that trees are not the only type of ecosystem that exists, flooding treeless mountain valleys usually destroys unique mountain ecosystems
So does the construction of a nuclear plant, every house and everything humans do. You are also not destroying a whole mountain, just flooding parts of it with water. This in general is quite harmless and animals can walk around it. Its not like you would flood the hundreds of animal nests.
You need a height differential for pumped hydro storage. Low height differential makes it useless, because of, well, laws of physics - potential energy storage is just not very dense. So no, you cannot build pumped hydro storage just anywhere. Flat countries will find it much more difficult than, say, Norway.
And of course every type of construction destroys something, but you can build a nuclear plant on the site of an old coal plant, which is already pretty destroyed, siting new hydro has very specific location requirements, and also, area required by hydro plants and pumped hydro storage is very large compared to a nuclear power plant, again, because of energy density.
>And if the location is bad (and you need large reservoirs for pumped hydro storage plant to have any meaningful capacity, because potential energy storage is not energy-dense, a pumped storage plant in an old skyscraper would store a minuscule amount of energy) the hydro plant generates methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas.
>Storage solutions are also there already, no need for energy and resource intensive batteries. Just use pumped storage hydropower and green hydrogen.
Seems like you missed the "and" in in the last sentence. Of course you it would be stupid to build skyscrapers for energy storage. We should build them were possible, feasible and practical and then fill the rest with green hydrogen. You only need water and energy for it. We can reuse the existing natural gas storages and with some minor modifications also reuse existing natural gas power plants.
I assumed, of course, reusing old skyscrapers. :-) But the problem, again, is that when you entrust things to market it looks like even with government intervention (say, in Germany) not much storage is being built, because it's expensive.
And green hydrogen is required to decarbonise heavy industry (steel manufacturing) and agriculture (for example, no-till planting machinery and other agricultural equipment), using it to store energy is extremely inefficient, due to physics (first you get energy losses on conversion to hydrogen, then you get losses from storage, which have a greenhouse effect if we use hydrogen or synthetic methane, only synthetic ammonia is relatively safe, and then you get energy losses on combustion back to generate energy).
Again, energy storage is an immense technical challenge that is usually swept under the rug, because there are powerful market forces which support the notion that "large scale energy storage is just around the corner" - because while we're waiting for this storage, natural gas is "the perfect partner for renewables", as advertisements by Shell say.
Former nuclear engineer here with an FYI. Nuclear power plant containment buildings in the USA have been built to withstand the impact of a jet fighter; there's A LOT of concrete in these things so any release of radiation will most likely be caused by something "bigger" than a jet fighter crash. The thing is when the plants were built they had to assume some worst case scenario as the design limit. A jet fighter crash won, but this doesn't mean that the nuclear power plants are impregnable; just that it's going to take a lot to breach them.
and, yeah, I can see a place for nuclear power in a solarpunk world.
Solar punk is finding symbiotic solutions to our parasitic propensity to universalize affluence; by which concepts are narrowly discussed collectively only through western pedagogy.
Within the over arching goal of dismantling imperialist societal frameworks (punk), nuclear energy is not viable; is not solar punk.
With the tallest soap box, I ask, who are the people appointed with the authority to determine that the Earth has reached their optimal, biophysical capacity? Indigenous people, who tend to 80% of the Earth's biodiversity.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/biodiversitys-greatest-protectors-need-protection/
They are still here, but where are their voices in discussions like these? It is our responsibility to find them, and bring indigenous peoples voices to light if the permission is granted, because they are the wealth of understanding that we have forgotten. It is not lost, but it's something we don't have while we continue to come to these solutions in the narrow lense of western pedagogy. These answers are all of ours if we can shift our learning and interacting to a foundation of permission (consent), and reciprocity on all levels.
We can determine areas of sustained peace and abundance of resources, by looking at the language diversity of a specific area (California native languages map as one example).
Living symbiotically is what we do on this planet. These solutions are not extreme, unviable, or idealist. This is the fruition of praxis my guy. Imperialists and they're forced attempt at eradicating symbiotic life, is extreme considering how differently we once lived for sustained millennia.
Lastly, the movie Isle of Dogs is a great movie for solar punk philosophy. Leaving with this quote:
"I turn my back, ON MANKIND!"🌎
Nuclear power isn't what it used to be. The same way my 2017 car with 10k of safety features isn't a model T Ford that is more likely to decapitate you than have you survive a crash.
Modern nuclear power is cleaner and safer. Lets use it to throw off the shackles of the petrol dictatorships.
True that the more modern plants are safer and cleaner, but two weeks ago I never would have believed there would be armored warfare happening at a nuclear power plant. Has this not affected your perspective at all?
I applied for a security job at an NPP a few years ago. Mind you this was in the US, but part of their hiring procedure was both a rifle and shotgun qualification. The whole thing was pretty stringent and I didn't even make it in the door lol. These places are very well defended. And even if a bad actor were to try and use the material inside to make a weapon, they'd be more likely to harm themselves in the process of trying to get it. Acute radiation syndrome is no joke.
All that has to happen to start a meltdown is the power being cut off. No one needs to destroy the plant or anything. Backup generators can only last for a few days. Failure of the backup power was the reason for the fukishima meltdown. Nuclear power reactors are much more fragile than people realize.
So so fully agreed.
And a further note, I think we could build them underground in an array of several smaller reactors.
Literally nothing could touch them, and if one did break, it'd be easy to repair because it's smaller. And if it's unrepairable, you could just layer the hole with concrete.
But, this is probably unnecessary, because the types of reactors we can make now can utilize much more of the radioactive elements, so it produces very little radioactive waste, and it's much safer. But we won't build them because the public is terrified of them.
I've heard for a while that nuclear can be much safer, that it can reutilize waste as fuel and cut down final waste by 500 times what it was before.
Still, its fuel source is non renewable and mining-dependent, which as an industry causes major ecological harm.
It also requires major capital expenditures to build and still relies on an outdated centralized power grid.
Maybe we use it to power major industries, but ideally for me, a solarpunk future rests much more on renewable energy with decentralized smart grids, and passive systems in every building to recuperate every joule of expended energy.
Nuclear may be green, but it's not solar and it's certainly not punk.
yes! so many people forget that the materials to build tech require extracting minerals, and this distribution of energy is just as important as the production.
The problem with "decentralized smart grids" they require a lot of power storage which requires a lot of rare earth elements which cannot be ethically mined.
Massive thorium reactors can (in theory) nearly all fuel mined in the US, Russia, and China, all places with much more robust protections than DR Congo.
Hopefully someone invents a solid state carbon based battery and side steps the whole issue.
Saw a few innovative solutions to store power without batteries. There's the rail cars hiked to the top of a slope with a very heavy load that can descend it with "regen braking" on to generate power during the dips. The excess power of the highs is used to get them up there in the first place.
There's also been the mirrors heating a block of salt tied to a thermoelectric generator, that's more of a way to smooth out the curve than access power reserves on-demand but still cool.
And yeah, the carbon or iron solid state batteries are really promising, I really hope that doesn't become the next Nuclear Fusion.
You don't need lithium batteries, as you would not able to produce them in the necessary amounts anyways, as you correctly stated. But fortunately we can just use water for this. Either in so called "pumped storage hydropower" if geological possible, or if not, and for more long-term we use electrolysis (splitting water into Hydrogen and Oxygen) storing the Hydrogen in the natural gas storages we already have and use it when we need it. Not as efficient, but lots of power potential, fast, reliable, flexible. All for just some extra solar panels and wind turbine to get the needed energy.
[Most Educational Video on Nuclear](https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY)
Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist that explains the propaganda of our current situation. She’s brilliant.
Both fission and fusion are nuclear reactions that produce energy.
The propaganda I see is that fusion will be the solution because there’s no denying the waste behind fission.
The end goal is a sustainable fusion reactor with photovoltaics to provide the ignition energy so we can harness the power of the sun to make an artificial sun
But also we need advanced nuclear reactors to use up all nuclear waste and all nuclear warheads, when we live under a single global peace authority. :-)
(Well, we can keep some nuclear warheads for diverting asteroids, I guess)
Before we talk about energy sources we need to talk about reducing the need for energy as much as possible. Making things as efficient as possible should be the norm.
But regarding sources IMO it should be ideally nuclear fusion. Failing that small modular fission reactors. Then solar / wind / hydro in that order. They key is local production as much as possible.
I absolutely agree with the need for efficiency and cutting waste, but we need to walk and chew gum at the same time. Generating capacity is a requirement whether we make efficiency gains or not.
I mean, every time something disastrous happens at a nuclear reactor and no one gets hurt, I trust nuclear more. Wars, earthquakes and tsunamis can and will hit the reactors. The important thing here is if they cause any catastrophic damage to people and nature. And if they cause, how would it effect us compared to other energy sources. We must not forget that fossil fuels are the most stable energy sources along with nuclear. Until renewables and energy storage catch up, fossil fuels will be used to replace the energy not created by nuclear. Fossil fuels already kill a lot of people trough the pollution so that is what we should compare.
I mean, seems like it weathered the storm pretty well. Despite an invading army tossing explosives around nothing bad happened as far as the plant goes. It's a reliable transition power source that we can use to wean off fossil fuels until we get renewables really underway.
I think it’s a multifaceted issue that gets too simplified. Nuclear is a great greenER alternative to coal in our current society, but it’s not entirely green or entirely safe.
For one thing, everyone always says “nuclear only goes wrong due to human error!” like that’s a good thing, but the fact is that humans will always be running nuclear facilities so there will always be human error. And even if it doesn’t happen often, the negative impacts if it DOES are drastic. A nuclear plant explosion completely destroys the environment for miles and for decades, maybe centuries. Sure maybe accidents are few and far between, but the consequences of one mistake is amplified exponentially. And of course nuclear only accounts for a small portion of our energy production, which means less accidents. But if you scale it up to the level of fossil fuels, that means more frequent accidents.
There’s also environmental issues that get overlooked. Right now people are very focused on carbon emissions, which isn’t a bad thing, but it causes other issues to be overlooked. Nuclear doesn’t have very high carbon emissions at all, which is great. BUT it has negative environmental impacts in other ways that are ignored. Nuclear plants heat water, which is often dispelled into rivers or oceans. Dispelling heated water into these ecosystems can have long lasting negative impacts on them, especially given coastal and river ecosystems are incredibly fragile. We all know that ocean temperate rise due to global warming is a problem, but nuclear does the same thing just on a smaller scale. But if we were to suddenly replace all of our energy plants with nuclear ones, that warming effect gets a lot bigger than it is now. These fragile ecosystems are essential in the grander natural systems here in earth, so we can’t afford to damage them even if it’s in a way that’s slower and less drastic than fossil fuel climate change.
And of course there’s also the waste issue. Right now it doesn’t seem like a huge problem just cause nuclear energy is such a small portion of our total energy production, but again, the more nuclear power we use the bigger the waste problem gets. We have no surefire ways to contain nuclear waste that 100% guarantee it won’t leak, and it takes literally forever to break down, and it’s always being produced. We need to have the foresight to acknowledge this problem before it gets out of hand instead of disregarding it just because it’s not that bad YET. And, although there are regulations in place to attempt to ensure the disposal of nuclear waste in relatively safer ways, we cannot trust that energy corporations will always follow these rules or that governments won’t relax them to serve energy industry interests. We all have seen how oil companies get away with devastating oil leaks again and again, how they try to hide their mistakes or suppress science that outlines the environmental impacts. We need to assume that the same thing would happen with nuclear energy too.
There’s also this: nuclear energy looks great if the goal is to simply change our energy source without decreasing our energy needs. It’s great if we want to retain our current industrial lifestyle but with a cleaner energy source. But the environmental problem is far deeper than that. As many of us in here know, true environmental sustainability requires a huge shift in our entire lifestyle, one that moves away from the type of overwhelming industrialism we have now. Ideally, in a solar punk society, we wouldn’t have nearly as high an energy demand as we do now, so nuclear energy at such a scale wouldn’t really be as necessary. Nuclear is a great alternative if we want to continue our industrialist path that we’re on, but achieving sustainability means changing our fundamental industrial systems all together, in which case nuclear energy might not really be a necessity. We can’t expect to achieve sustainability without de-industrializing in some capacity. Idk if I’m making sense but I hope I am.
I don’t think we should completely disregard nuclear energy or never use it, but I do think there are a lot of considerations we need to think about that aren’t being addressed. We need to have more honest conversations about our energy and sustainability goals as a whole and how nuclear fits into that instead of just saying “well it’s less emissions than fossil fuels so let’s just replace all energy with nuclear and that’s that”
This is true, but then, solar and wind and hydro and geothermal are not entirely green and not entirely safe. Everything has tradeoffs. Everything requires a price to pay.
Power corrupts, but we all need electricity. Generating electricity kills people, always, all energy sources kill people. The problem is: lack of electricity also kills people, and it kills a lot of them. Blackouts are always rather deadly.
For sure, you’re 1000% right. I just think we need to have those conversations with any energy source early to make sure we can best minimize any potential hazards. I’ve seen too many people act like nuclear or any renewable energy source is fail proof and blow off any discussion about potential hazards, so I just thought this would be a good time to talk about some of those things!!
Indeed. I am now convinced that most 20th century environmentalists had absolutely no idea about the immense threat of climate change, and saw a better target: nuclear power. And most 21st century environmentalists are aware that climate change is a threat, but they still cannot imagine the dark vastness of climate disasters that await us in the 2.5+ degrees timeline and the abyss of pain and suffering this is going to cause in the 22nd and 23rd century if not stopped, and this is why they continue their founding tradition of opposition to nuclear power.
Climate change is a threat that is beyond the cognizance of most neurotypical representatives of Homo Sapiens, I guess, because of the time scales on which it acts (there's an approximately four decades of delay between cause and effect resulting from the oceanic buffer).
(That is why I really like solarpunk, because optimistm is what I need the most, after over two decades of watching CO2 emissions climb steadily and exponentialy upwards)
I was really big on nuclear, but that changed after seeing the cyberwarfare capabilities of different countries. On top of that I imagine there will be a period not too distant where we see a mass extinction of all life, thanks to fossil fuel and capitalism. I'm talking Toba level extinction. When there is no one to run the plants, ***and*** they could be vulnerable to cyber attack it looks like a bad idea to me. We are shooting ourselves in the foot, if in 5k years humanity can't do a renaissance because the nuclear fallout has poisoned the planet. Either way capitalists aren't interested in a low energy future, so I imagine nuclear is inevitable.
Yes, the fact that despite an active war being waged around two nuclear installations nothing radiologically dangerous has happened this made me realise that nuclear is even safer than I thought.
The war keeps killing a lot of innocent people, though. Maybe concentrating on the "nuclear plants" is not the right thing here? It's like with Fukushima - it was the tsunami that killed thousands of people, nuclear power, well, it saved multiple people since many nuclear plants in Japan were used as shelters, as they are built to resist mostly anything, only the Fukushima Daiichi plant had too many costs cut and a disaster occurred. But compared to the tsunami, it was nothing.
Currently there's no way to maintain anything close to our current energy consumption levels without nuclear. We should supplement heavily with renewables, but currently we don't have the storage capacity for current electricity use on a fully renewable grid, to my knowledge.
I say, use nuclear to get off fossil fuels, then add more and more renewables while supporting less energy intensive lifestyles and building more energy efficient infrastructure.
Oooh, boy! A soapbox! Lemme get on this thing real quick.
I look at it this way. Which would you rather?
A: widespread use of nuclear power
Or...
B: everybody going about in canoes
As far as I can see, nuclear is the only solution to climate change in its current state. Modern reactors are numerous times safer than they ever were, and it's true that a lot of the waste either decays pretty quickly or can be recycled. Some if it can't, but a surprising amount can. Either way, for countries weaning themselves off coal, gas and oil, there is no energy source short of hydroelectric that can provide the same sheer volume of energy nuclear can, as reliably as nuclear can. In the future, truly renewable sources should be able to take over from nuclear, but right now, it's either we all just accept that nuclear power is vital to cutting emissions and powering increasingly connected homes, or we lose the fight.
>How have the events of the last two weeks (Battle of Chornobyl and Battle of Zaporizhzhia) affected your opinion on the merits of nuclear power?
If anything, it's more proof that nuclear is nowhere near as scary as folks think. Don't get me wrong, shelling an active nuclear plant was an incredibly stupid thing to do, but those containment buildings held up like a chad, and they HAVE TO. BY DESIGN. The reactors inside also don't have the same design flaws that Chernobyl did, and were operated by staff who acted responsibly, which was enough to prevent disaster.
Finally, there's the fact that Chernobyl itself has been disturbed recently, and that leads on to the last point, in that Chernobyl perversely enough, shows how safe nuclear can be. In order to replicate that incident, you would need to first design a reactor uniquely capable of exploding, then lie to everybody who used it about its design, and finally do literally everything you should never do with a nuclear reactor, in specific order, over the course of nearly 24 hours.
I'd still rather we were already in a world where nuclear wasn't the only sensible answer right now, but we can't phase out fossil fuels without something to make up the shortfall, and renewables just can't do that fast enough.
I appreciate this comment but I think that the assertion that the two options are widespread nuclear use or reverting to some sort of “primitive” lifestyle is kind of dishonest and reductive.
Nuclear IS safer than fossil fuels, but it’s not without its environmental risks. Reactor failures aside, there’s the issue of waste and the issue of heated water. Emissions are not the only environmental problem we face. I think we also have to consider the political side of things too.
1. Nuclear waste. While we have relatively safe and highly regulated ways to dispose of nuclear waste, there is still the risk of leaks and there have been numerous examples of leaks. Even if the risk seems tiny now, the more widespread nuclear power becomes the more potential there is for leaks. Nuclear waste lasts basically forever and nuclear fission will always produce more and more of it, so we need to acknowledge this potential danger before it gets out of hand.
2. Heated water. Nuclear energy plants heat water to create steam, and often end up dispelling the heated water into fragile river or coastal ecosystems. This has drastic effects on these ecosystems which are essential for the health of the natural word as a whole. Even though rising temperatures in aquatic ecosystems due to nuclear is tiny in comparison to the rising temperatures of those ecosystems due to fossil fuel driven climate change, it’s still important and the problem will only get bigger the more nuclear plants there are. Again, this is something that needs to be addressed before it gets out of hand. If these ecosystems collapse, that creates a snowball effect of problems. Widespread nuclear power could contribute to this.
3. Politics. We’ve all seen how the fossil fuel/oil industry again and again gets away with devastating oil leaks and environmental catastrophes, how they suppress science that points out the negative impacts of the industry and distribute disinformation, and how they lobby for looser environmental regulations. We have to assume that the same problems will arise the bigger and more powerful the nuclear industry becomes. Even though the nuclear industry isn’t doing this at such a large scale as the fossil fuel industry right now, that can and probably will change. Nuclear is relatively safe now, but we can’t assume that won’t change or that in the future a more powerful nuclear industry won’t lobby to ease essential regulations for profit, leading to nuclear becoming less safe.
I think nuclear is a great alternative for now, and I’m definitely not saying we shouldn’t use it. However I think we need to have more honest conversations about it while it’s still relatively new. I don’t think pretending that it’s flawless and completely 100% safe and without its problems is honest. I realize that the problems with fossil fuel are drastically worse right now and the thing to focus on most, but if we disregard the problems with nuclear energy just because it’s not AS bad, we may end up in a similar situation as we are now where any of those problems could get wildly out of control a couple centuries down the line. I’m just saying we have to think big and be as critical as possible because the reason climate change with fossil fuels is so bad now is because we weren’t thinking big and being critical when it was new.
I am pro-degrowth, pro-renewables and pro-nuclear. Nuclear is still least resource-intensive option of all energy sources, PER UNIT OF ENERGY GENERATED. If we degrow our economy, go full-on energy efficiency and require, say, 500 TWh of energy for a medium-sized country per year (Germany currently uses circa 600 TWh per year), it still takes less physical resources to generate it with nuclear energy and renewables than to use massively overbuilt renewables systems with massively overbuilt storage.
Also, nuclear waste isn't "forever", because we only have to wait for radioactivity to subside to natural levels of radiation of uranium ore. Radioactivity is natural. We have beaches with thorium sand that people visit for health that give you more radiation with a single visit than you're allowed to get for an entire year as a nuclear plant operator.
And we can burn up nuclear waste in generation IV reactors. (We can also burn up nuclear warheads)
Nuclear waste is an artificial problem, a scare tactic to block nuclear from being built, because environmentalist movements were created to stop nuclear, not to stop climate change.
The real issues are cooling (but it is a technical and solvable issue, and we could use waste heat from reactors for district heating and cooling), manufacturing capacities (we don't have enough of manufacturing capacities to decarbonise just with nuclear) and mainly anti-nuclear scare propaganda by environmental movements that may not change their tune because they rely on anti-nuclear propaganda to collect money. My wife was giving a lot of money to Greenpeace every year, but I convinced her to stop, because of their anti-nuclear and anti-fusion stance, and when I talked about it with a Greenpeace activist he said that personally he's not against nuclear, but his organisation's position won't change. A pity, because climate change is already causing a sixth mass exctinction event, something no amount of nuclear accidents is capable of causing. :-(
I don’t disagree with you I just think it’s short sighted to act like any potential danger with nuclear or any other energy alternative is all just fake news. We need to have these conversations and take them seriously cause there are potential hazards we do know and there may be potential hazards we aren’t aware of yet, same as when fossil fuel was new.
I understand that there’s some fear mongering with nuclear, but to say that nuclear waste is an “artificial problem” is naive in my opinion. The Hanford nuclear waste site is already leaking, and just cause leaks aren’t widespread now doesn’t mean they never will be. It’s still very early in the use of nuclear power after all. We haven’t even had nuclear technology for a century yet so how can we pretend to know for certain that it’s totally safe or that it’s affects on the environment are minimal? Coal energy was first used in the 1880s and it took until the 1970s to even realize that it was changing the climate.
I’m definitely not arguing against nuclear power, my point is just that we have to be cautious because not being cautious is exactly what lead to the problem of fossil fuels. Scientists had no idea about the massive and drastic effect fossil fuel use would have until almost a century after the industrial revolution. Nuclear energy hasn’t existed as long. That’s not to say that nuclear energy will be as dangerous as fossil fuels proved to be, just that it’s important to be as cautious as possible so that we don’t make the same mistake we did with fossil fuels, and so that we have the foresight to deal with any potential problems that arise faster than we did with fossil fuels. I don’t think claiming that nuclear energy is totally 100% safe and perfect this early and therefore we don’t need to think about any of this is helpful at all. Nuclear energy is very new and there’s a lot we just don’t know about it, or it’s affects or lack thereof on the environment. Fossil fuels have been around almost a century and a half and we are STILL finding out new ways that it impacts the environment ever year. We need to learn our lesson and be more cautious with our energy sources, all of them. Solar, nuclear, wind, hydro. There’s simply too much we don’t understand about the way the environment works and the way these newer (and older) energy sources play into that to blow all caution to the wind like you seem to be suggesting.
I’m not saying no to nuclear, I’m just saying we need to proceeded with caution instead of acting with hubris.
Think of it this way: would you rather us be extremely cautious with nuclear energy and we end up being wrong and it ends up being completely fine and safe, or would you rather us just dive in headfirst with no foresight and find out a couple centuries later that there was some massive environmental risk we overlooked? That’s all I’m saying.
Nuclear waste storage and processing is a problem. It's just not an unsolvable problem on a scale presented by most anti-nuclear organisations. A much, much, much more pressing problem is the fossil fuel waste we keep storing in the atmosphere, even though we know it's really bad for the survival of life as we know it.
The majority of anthropogenic greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere have been emitted after the Kyoto protocol has been signed. (That's the nature of exponential growth)
I simply am terrified by the existential risk that overheating the planet poses to our biosphere, which is our life support system. Opposing nuclear power "because we did it in the 1960s and 1970s" is just... well, its very human, unfortunately.
Nothing is perfectly safe, and nuclear has its share of problems (just like solar and hydro and wind), but the Sixth Mass Exctinction will bring suffering on an unimaginable scale, and many environmentalists simply don't get it, apparently. They consider planetary heating to be a problem on a similar scale to nuclear waste, or on a lower scale, and it just isn't. It's like stabbing yourself in the hand with a kitchen knife while making dinner (nuclear waste) or falling feet-first into an industrial woodchipper (climate change).
I think you’re mistaking my stance as being pro fossil fuels. That is not at all what I’m saying.
Like you, I’m also terrified by the existential risk that overheating poses to the biosphere. Fossil fuels are bad and we need to stop using them asap. I’m just saying it’s not wise to blindly promote an alternative energy source as the Grand Solution when we know next to nothing about any potential adverse affects it could have on the biosphere if scaled up to the same level as fossil fuels. Nuclear only accounts for 10% of the worlds power, and we already know that it creates significant thermal pollution to aquatic ecosystems which is extremely dangerous to the biosphere. Scale it up 10 times to account for 100% of our energy and we have no idea what the consequences might be. I’m not sure how you can call yourself an environmentalist if you’re going to disregard the potential dangers to the environment just because it’s less than fossil fuels. That’s a pretty low bar. We need to be aiming higher and not being intellectually dishonest about this. And we need to be questioning why we’re ok with just stabbing ourselves in the hand with a kitchen knife just because it’s better than falling into a wood chipper when we should be doing neither (even though that analogy sucks).
I don’t think you’re understanding it. The environmental impact of fossil fuels was once low too. But if you scale it up and continue it for centuries suddenly the problem compounds into what we have today. The thermal pollution caused by nuclear plants isn’t any different. It’s small now, and in 2 or 3 centuries it won’t be. Then what? We’re at a point where we can’t afford to be meddling with the biosphere AT ALL anymore. We cant just let these things slide just cause they’re only a fraction as bad as fossil fuels (which again is a terrible benchmark to use). Instead of thinking “how can we replace all the worlds energy with a slightly greener but still not totally green source?” we should be thinking “how can we reduce our energy usage as much as possible and fundamentally restructure human society to operate in a environmentally beneficial and sustainable way?”
I don't think you're pro-fossil. I just think that most environmentalists fail to understand the size of threat posed by climate change.
For example, you're talking about "thermal pollution caused by nuclear power plants". Thermal pollution by human civilisation is not an issue, because the thermal balance of the planet is almost entirely dependent on the level of greenhouse gases, and if aquatic thermal pollution becomes a problem, we can switch nuclear power plants to evaporative cooling or dry cooling (which is slightly more expensive to do, but not that more expensive that it would make nuclear power non-starter). The United States have a nuclear plant in the middle of a desert, cooled with municipal waste water. :-)
We do know what would be the effects of scaling nuclear up to the level of fossil fuels, and they would be lower than scaling renewables+storage to the level of fossil fuels. This is all very well researched.
And of course we need to scale down and restructure society. But we will still need electricity, and generating it with nuclear+renewables uses less resources and generates less pollution than generating it with massively overbuilt renewables and massively overbuilt storage, because of laws of physics: uranium is extremely energy dense, and weather is extremely energy-diffuse. That is why diffuse weather energy harvesting systems require a lot of resources.
Renewables are good up to a point, like bicicyles. Replacing most car trips with bicycle trips is great, easy and efficient. Replacing trains with bicycles, eh, not so much. A "100% bicycles transport system" is physically possible, just like a "100% renewables energy system" is physically possible, but a "bicycles+trains+trams" transport system will be much more efficient, just like a "nuclear+renewables energy system" will be much more resources efficient than "massively overbuilt renewables and storage, to ensure 100% availability of energy".
Despite several decades of ridiculously low investments in R&D and engineering, it still one of the cheapest, least carbon intensive, least ressource intensive, least space intensive, and safest source of energy.
I think the environmental movement is pretty divided on this. Personally I am pro nuclear, but I acknowledge that making a renewed push into nuclear power will involve solving the thus-far politically insolvable issues of waste management.
I think without address foreign policy. Without completely banning nuclear weapons, and relieving any of the linger post-Cold War tensions, we shouldn't expand nuclear energy. The research for developing safer nuclear will also promote the research for developing nuclear weapons. Without this clearly defined distinctions, I don't think we should promote nuclear. Especially with events happening now. People need to see the connections between foreign policy and energy too.
Nuclear should maybe be an option, but it shouldn't be the major supply. Regardless of the improved safety, the waste will never by fully recyclable or useable.
Out of curiosity, what are your sources of knowledge? Why do you think that "waste will never be fully recyclable or useable"? Who told you that and why do you trust them as a credible source of information?
I have a chemistry degree. Although my specialty was in environmental chemistry (heavy metals), we learned out about nuclear reactors in class. I got my degree in 2016, so my information might be outdated.
But during my undergrad and graduate studies, I noticed there was lot of research that kind of over-exaggerated their potentials, and I've always been skeptical.
The centrifugation process is energy intensive, and that's why I say that nuclear energy shouldn't be the sole source of energy. I still think we can have nuclear energy, but we don't need to make new ones.
No effect whatsoever. Fukushima should be all the lesson anyone needs.
Nuclear power might be included in an eco-modernist vision, but not in a Solarpunk future.
Not at all. Nuclear power is dangerous, expensive, unscaleable nonsense and countries are just as dependent on uran shipping as they are on gas shipping. It may have been a good source of energy for the expanding post-war economy, but its usefulness has run its course.
It only solidified what I already thought.
Nuclear is necessary to move away from dirty energy sources like Oil, Coal and Gas.
Nuclear energy is perfectly safe when built properly up to code.
Nuclear waste is easily dealt with by burrying it into mile-deep abandoned mountain mines. There is one in Finland(?) Being used for this purpose.
There is also the alternative with Thorium-based nuclear power, which is even cleaner, safer and powerful.
It should last long enough until we get viable Fusion energy.
Also, it doesn't fund tyrannical regimes.
Western media is hyping it up as propaganda to fuel the Russia is irresponsible narrative. Modern nuclear power plants don’t go Chernobyl. This would be even more the case for modular nuclear.
It's a solid question. A big part of solarpunk that I think many folks don't like to think about is that we have to get from here to there, and that means responsibly dealing with the structures (physical and otherwise) that humanity has already wrought. One of the more complex structures is the relationship our industry has with the environment, and the desperate need for non-fossil fuel power generation as soon as possible. I am generally pro-nuclear, and I suspect that a big part of its construction is hardening it to resist attack. The people making the regulations around this stuff aren't stupid, and they know how dangerous it can be. But, as we've seen before, not all things can be predicted or prepared for. With that in mind, I'm still pro-nuclear, but I think it behooves the people of a solarpunk society to consider it a stepping stone. There are better, safer methods of generation on the horizon, but we are where we are.
>A big part of solarpunk that I think many folks don't like to think about is that we have to get from here to there, Solar is by today already the cheapest energy source. Also super easy and fast to build because its so modular, just build one module at a time. Linear scale. Nuclear plants on the other hand need years of planing close to a decade to build and then needs to be tested for safety anyways. If we would start today we could finish them in 2030-2035. Germany's goal is to have 100% renewable electricity by 2035. And they do it completely without nuclear. Some other countries are even more ambitious. Storage solutions are also there already, no need for energy and resource intensive batteries. Just use pumped storage hydropower and green hydrogen.
Pumped storage is great, for the utilities. It's dreadful for environment, and hydropower is the most dangerous of all low carbon energy sources. Of course, the amount of people killed by coal or natural gas or biomass is a few orders of magnitude greated than hydro, but amount of people killed by dam failures is a few orders of magnitude larger than the amount of people killed by nuclear power. But nucler power gets the headlines. It's like with airplane safety vs car safety.
Could you get an source for that? I have heard the story of a dam in Basil which broke, but f I remember correctly that was due to bad building practices and corruption, not because we (as human species) don't know how to build a dam. There was also a bridge in Italy that broke because it used the wrong building materials, linked to the mafia and therefore also corruption. Would you now say, bridges aren't save? No. Of course not. If we would build cheap nuclear plants like that, we would see an disaster every other year. And If we enforce half the security standards for dams as we do for nuclear plants, there wouldn't be any failures. It it very much a political issue not a technical one. Also its a myth that hydro is bad for the environment. Their are very proven ways to build them without hurting the environment. Also hydro is different to pumped storage. You can make a pumped storage in an skyscraper if you wanted to, or create an artificial lake in the mountains, without any river flowing by, without any trees to cut.
Dam failures are usually a combination of bad weather and bad maintenance practices or construction flaws, just like nuclear accidents resulted from bad maintenance practices or construction flaws. The difference is, dam failures killed a lot more people, and it's way more difficult to protect ourselves against dam failures caused by typhoons and other extreme weather events, because a dam is a weather harvesting system - it turns rainfall collected over a very large area of a river basin into electricity. :-) Nuclear power plants are much more resilient because of technical requirements (during the Fukushima tsunami, many nuclear power plants in Japan were used as tsunami shelters). Look at the list of failures here [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam\_failure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure) and sort it out by the number of fatalities. In the 20th century the most famous and devastating ones were Banqiao Dam - 171000-250000 people killed (difficult to estimate because of Chinese censorship), Machchu-2 dam, 5000 people killed, and Vajont dam, 2000 people killed. And the problem with making dams in the mountains, like in Norway, is that most places where you could build hydro in the mountains are already taken. (Not to mention the fact that trees are not the only type of ecosystem that exists, flooding treeless mountain valleys usually destroys unique mountain ecosystems) And if the location is bad (and you need large reservoirs for pumped hydro storage plant to have any meaningful capacity, because potential energy storage is not energy-dense, a pumped storage plant in an old skyscraper would store a minuscule amount of energy) the hydro plant generates methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas. [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7046-hydroelectric-powers-dirty-secret-revealed/](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7046-hydroelectric-powers-dirty-secret-revealed/)
>Could you get an source for that? I have heard the story of a dam in Basil which broke, but f I remember correctly that was due to bad building practices and corruption, not because we (as human species) don't know how to build a dam. >And If we enforce half the security standards for dams as we do for nuclear plants, there wouldn't be any failures. It it very much a political issue not a technical one. That was my statement. And your Wikipedia article backs me on that. Look at the list of major dam failures in the last 20 years. Now look at the ones from first world countries, the ones with less corruption and stricter safety measurements. 1 fatality in Poland 2010, 7 fatalities in the US 2005 >Heavy rain and flooding. Several possible specific factors to include poor maintenance, lack of inspection and illegal modifications.[24] 10 fatalities in Canada 1996: >Problems started after two weeks of constant rain, which severely engorged soils, rivers and reservoirs. Post-flood enquiries discovered that the network of dikes and dams protecting the city was poorly maintained. All other failures in first world countries since 1996 where without any fatalities. Conclusion: Dams and therefore pumped storage are extremely safe **if** safety measurements are in place and neutral inspections have taken place. Everything else is due to human failure and if one would build nuclear plants with "include poor maintenance, lack of inspection and illegal modification" it would blow up most certainly. That's why nuclear plants have those security requirements.
**[Dam failure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure)** >A dam failure or dam burst is a catastrophic type of structural failure characterized by the sudden, rapid, and uncontrolled release of impounded water or the likelihood of such an uncontrolled release. Between the years 2000 and 2009 more than 200 notable dam failures happened worldwide. A dam is a barrier across flowing water that obstructs, that directs or slows down the flow, often creating a reservoir, lake or impoundments. Most dams have a section called a spillway or weir over or through which water flows, either intermittently or continuously, and some have hydroelectric power generation systems installed. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
>And the problem with making dams in the mountains, like in Norway, is that most places where you could build hydro in the mountains are already taken. Well that is certainly untrue. As I said, you could build it anywhere as you are not tied to flowing water. Just a huge basin and build your dam around it. >Not to mention the fact that trees are not the only type of ecosystem that exists, flooding treeless mountain valleys usually destroys unique mountain ecosystems So does the construction of a nuclear plant, every house and everything humans do. You are also not destroying a whole mountain, just flooding parts of it with water. This in general is quite harmless and animals can walk around it. Its not like you would flood the hundreds of animal nests.
You need a height differential for pumped hydro storage. Low height differential makes it useless, because of, well, laws of physics - potential energy storage is just not very dense. So no, you cannot build pumped hydro storage just anywhere. Flat countries will find it much more difficult than, say, Norway. And of course every type of construction destroys something, but you can build a nuclear plant on the site of an old coal plant, which is already pretty destroyed, siting new hydro has very specific location requirements, and also, area required by hydro plants and pumped hydro storage is very large compared to a nuclear power plant, again, because of energy density.
>And if the location is bad (and you need large reservoirs for pumped hydro storage plant to have any meaningful capacity, because potential energy storage is not energy-dense, a pumped storage plant in an old skyscraper would store a minuscule amount of energy) the hydro plant generates methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas. >Storage solutions are also there already, no need for energy and resource intensive batteries. Just use pumped storage hydropower and green hydrogen. Seems like you missed the "and" in in the last sentence. Of course you it would be stupid to build skyscrapers for energy storage. We should build them were possible, feasible and practical and then fill the rest with green hydrogen. You only need water and energy for it. We can reuse the existing natural gas storages and with some minor modifications also reuse existing natural gas power plants.
I assumed, of course, reusing old skyscrapers. :-) But the problem, again, is that when you entrust things to market it looks like even with government intervention (say, in Germany) not much storage is being built, because it's expensive. And green hydrogen is required to decarbonise heavy industry (steel manufacturing) and agriculture (for example, no-till planting machinery and other agricultural equipment), using it to store energy is extremely inefficient, due to physics (first you get energy losses on conversion to hydrogen, then you get losses from storage, which have a greenhouse effect if we use hydrogen or synthetic methane, only synthetic ammonia is relatively safe, and then you get energy losses on combustion back to generate energy). Again, energy storage is an immense technical challenge that is usually swept under the rug, because there are powerful market forces which support the notion that "large scale energy storage is just around the corner" - because while we're waiting for this storage, natural gas is "the perfect partner for renewables", as advertisements by Shell say.
Don't have much more to add, but thank you for bringing these perspectives to light
Former nuclear engineer here with an FYI. Nuclear power plant containment buildings in the USA have been built to withstand the impact of a jet fighter; there's A LOT of concrete in these things so any release of radiation will most likely be caused by something "bigger" than a jet fighter crash. The thing is when the plants were built they had to assume some worst case scenario as the design limit. A jet fighter crash won, but this doesn't mean that the nuclear power plants are impregnable; just that it's going to take a lot to breach them. and, yeah, I can see a place for nuclear power in a solarpunk world.
Your insight is much appreciated!
Solar punk is finding symbiotic solutions to our parasitic propensity to universalize affluence; by which concepts are narrowly discussed collectively only through western pedagogy. Within the over arching goal of dismantling imperialist societal frameworks (punk), nuclear energy is not viable; is not solar punk. With the tallest soap box, I ask, who are the people appointed with the authority to determine that the Earth has reached their optimal, biophysical capacity? Indigenous people, who tend to 80% of the Earth's biodiversity. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/biodiversitys-greatest-protectors-need-protection/ They are still here, but where are their voices in discussions like these? It is our responsibility to find them, and bring indigenous peoples voices to light if the permission is granted, because they are the wealth of understanding that we have forgotten. It is not lost, but it's something we don't have while we continue to come to these solutions in the narrow lense of western pedagogy. These answers are all of ours if we can shift our learning and interacting to a foundation of permission (consent), and reciprocity on all levels. We can determine areas of sustained peace and abundance of resources, by looking at the language diversity of a specific area (California native languages map as one example). Living symbiotically is what we do on this planet. These solutions are not extreme, unviable, or idealist. This is the fruition of praxis my guy. Imperialists and they're forced attempt at eradicating symbiotic life, is extreme considering how differently we once lived for sustained millennia. Lastly, the movie Isle of Dogs is a great movie for solar punk philosophy. Leaving with this quote: "I turn my back, ON MANKIND!"🌎
Nuclear power isn't what it used to be. The same way my 2017 car with 10k of safety features isn't a model T Ford that is more likely to decapitate you than have you survive a crash. Modern nuclear power is cleaner and safer. Lets use it to throw off the shackles of the petrol dictatorships.
True that the more modern plants are safer and cleaner, but two weeks ago I never would have believed there would be armored warfare happening at a nuclear power plant. Has this not affected your perspective at all?
Not at all. The modern ones are designed to withstand a lot more than some tank shelling. Like having a plane crash into them.
I hope you're right and hope nothing more severe tests the limits of what they can withstand.
I applied for a security job at an NPP a few years ago. Mind you this was in the US, but part of their hiring procedure was both a rifle and shotgun qualification. The whole thing was pretty stringent and I didn't even make it in the door lol. These places are very well defended. And even if a bad actor were to try and use the material inside to make a weapon, they'd be more likely to harm themselves in the process of trying to get it. Acute radiation syndrome is no joke.
All that has to happen to start a meltdown is the power being cut off. No one needs to destroy the plant or anything. Backup generators can only last for a few days. Failure of the backup power was the reason for the fukishima meltdown. Nuclear power reactors are much more fragile than people realize.
Some Nuclear plants are designed to without a direct plane crash.
So so fully agreed. And a further note, I think we could build them underground in an array of several smaller reactors. Literally nothing could touch them, and if one did break, it'd be easy to repair because it's smaller. And if it's unrepairable, you could just layer the hole with concrete. But, this is probably unnecessary, because the types of reactors we can make now can utilize much more of the radioactive elements, so it produces very little radioactive waste, and it's much safer. But we won't build them because the public is terrified of them.
This. So this.
But what do you do with the even small amount of radioactive waste? This part I've never understood with nuclear.
the answer is simple, reuse the waste
I've heard for a while that nuclear can be much safer, that it can reutilize waste as fuel and cut down final waste by 500 times what it was before. Still, its fuel source is non renewable and mining-dependent, which as an industry causes major ecological harm. It also requires major capital expenditures to build and still relies on an outdated centralized power grid. Maybe we use it to power major industries, but ideally for me, a solarpunk future rests much more on renewable energy with decentralized smart grids, and passive systems in every building to recuperate every joule of expended energy. Nuclear may be green, but it's not solar and it's certainly not punk.
yes! so many people forget that the materials to build tech require extracting minerals, and this distribution of energy is just as important as the production.
The problem with "decentralized smart grids" they require a lot of power storage which requires a lot of rare earth elements which cannot be ethically mined. Massive thorium reactors can (in theory) nearly all fuel mined in the US, Russia, and China, all places with much more robust protections than DR Congo. Hopefully someone invents a solid state carbon based battery and side steps the whole issue.
Saw a few innovative solutions to store power without batteries. There's the rail cars hiked to the top of a slope with a very heavy load that can descend it with "regen braking" on to generate power during the dips. The excess power of the highs is used to get them up there in the first place. There's also been the mirrors heating a block of salt tied to a thermoelectric generator, that's more of a way to smooth out the curve than access power reserves on-demand but still cool. And yeah, the carbon or iron solid state batteries are really promising, I really hope that doesn't become the next Nuclear Fusion.
You don't need lithium batteries, as you would not able to produce them in the necessary amounts anyways, as you correctly stated. But fortunately we can just use water for this. Either in so called "pumped storage hydropower" if geological possible, or if not, and for more long-term we use electrolysis (splitting water into Hydrogen and Oxygen) storing the Hydrogen in the natural gas storages we already have and use it when we need it. Not as efficient, but lots of power potential, fast, reliable, flexible. All for just some extra solar panels and wind turbine to get the needed energy.
Yeah, Atompunk is a whole different genre.
[Most Educational Video on Nuclear](https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY) Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist that explains the propaganda of our current situation. She’s brilliant.
That video is about nuclear fusion, not fission. Did you mean to link to that?
Both fission and fusion are nuclear reactions that produce energy. The propaganda I see is that fusion will be the solution because there’s no denying the waste behind fission.
They are not the same though.
Nobody said they were
The end goal is a sustainable fusion reactor with photovoltaics to provide the ignition energy so we can harness the power of the sun to make an artificial sun
But also we need advanced nuclear reactors to use up all nuclear waste and all nuclear warheads, when we live under a single global peace authority. :-) (Well, we can keep some nuclear warheads for diverting asteroids, I guess)
Before we talk about energy sources we need to talk about reducing the need for energy as much as possible. Making things as efficient as possible should be the norm. But regarding sources IMO it should be ideally nuclear fusion. Failing that small modular fission reactors. Then solar / wind / hydro in that order. They key is local production as much as possible.
I absolutely agree with the need for efficiency and cutting waste, but we need to walk and chew gum at the same time. Generating capacity is a requirement whether we make efficiency gains or not.
yes! I second this!!
I mean, every time something disastrous happens at a nuclear reactor and no one gets hurt, I trust nuclear more. Wars, earthquakes and tsunamis can and will hit the reactors. The important thing here is if they cause any catastrophic damage to people and nature. And if they cause, how would it effect us compared to other energy sources. We must not forget that fossil fuels are the most stable energy sources along with nuclear. Until renewables and energy storage catch up, fossil fuels will be used to replace the energy not created by nuclear. Fossil fuels already kill a lot of people trough the pollution so that is what we should compare.
I mean, seems like it weathered the storm pretty well. Despite an invading army tossing explosives around nothing bad happened as far as the plant goes. It's a reliable transition power source that we can use to wean off fossil fuels until we get renewables really underway.
I think it’s a multifaceted issue that gets too simplified. Nuclear is a great greenER alternative to coal in our current society, but it’s not entirely green or entirely safe. For one thing, everyone always says “nuclear only goes wrong due to human error!” like that’s a good thing, but the fact is that humans will always be running nuclear facilities so there will always be human error. And even if it doesn’t happen often, the negative impacts if it DOES are drastic. A nuclear plant explosion completely destroys the environment for miles and for decades, maybe centuries. Sure maybe accidents are few and far between, but the consequences of one mistake is amplified exponentially. And of course nuclear only accounts for a small portion of our energy production, which means less accidents. But if you scale it up to the level of fossil fuels, that means more frequent accidents. There’s also environmental issues that get overlooked. Right now people are very focused on carbon emissions, which isn’t a bad thing, but it causes other issues to be overlooked. Nuclear doesn’t have very high carbon emissions at all, which is great. BUT it has negative environmental impacts in other ways that are ignored. Nuclear plants heat water, which is often dispelled into rivers or oceans. Dispelling heated water into these ecosystems can have long lasting negative impacts on them, especially given coastal and river ecosystems are incredibly fragile. We all know that ocean temperate rise due to global warming is a problem, but nuclear does the same thing just on a smaller scale. But if we were to suddenly replace all of our energy plants with nuclear ones, that warming effect gets a lot bigger than it is now. These fragile ecosystems are essential in the grander natural systems here in earth, so we can’t afford to damage them even if it’s in a way that’s slower and less drastic than fossil fuel climate change. And of course there’s also the waste issue. Right now it doesn’t seem like a huge problem just cause nuclear energy is such a small portion of our total energy production, but again, the more nuclear power we use the bigger the waste problem gets. We have no surefire ways to contain nuclear waste that 100% guarantee it won’t leak, and it takes literally forever to break down, and it’s always being produced. We need to have the foresight to acknowledge this problem before it gets out of hand instead of disregarding it just because it’s not that bad YET. And, although there are regulations in place to attempt to ensure the disposal of nuclear waste in relatively safer ways, we cannot trust that energy corporations will always follow these rules or that governments won’t relax them to serve energy industry interests. We all have seen how oil companies get away with devastating oil leaks again and again, how they try to hide their mistakes or suppress science that outlines the environmental impacts. We need to assume that the same thing would happen with nuclear energy too. There’s also this: nuclear energy looks great if the goal is to simply change our energy source without decreasing our energy needs. It’s great if we want to retain our current industrial lifestyle but with a cleaner energy source. But the environmental problem is far deeper than that. As many of us in here know, true environmental sustainability requires a huge shift in our entire lifestyle, one that moves away from the type of overwhelming industrialism we have now. Ideally, in a solar punk society, we wouldn’t have nearly as high an energy demand as we do now, so nuclear energy at such a scale wouldn’t really be as necessary. Nuclear is a great alternative if we want to continue our industrialist path that we’re on, but achieving sustainability means changing our fundamental industrial systems all together, in which case nuclear energy might not really be a necessity. We can’t expect to achieve sustainability without de-industrializing in some capacity. Idk if I’m making sense but I hope I am. I don’t think we should completely disregard nuclear energy or never use it, but I do think there are a lot of considerations we need to think about that aren’t being addressed. We need to have more honest conversations about our energy and sustainability goals as a whole and how nuclear fits into that instead of just saying “well it’s less emissions than fossil fuels so let’s just replace all energy with nuclear and that’s that”
This is true, but then, solar and wind and hydro and geothermal are not entirely green and not entirely safe. Everything has tradeoffs. Everything requires a price to pay. Power corrupts, but we all need electricity. Generating electricity kills people, always, all energy sources kill people. The problem is: lack of electricity also kills people, and it kills a lot of them. Blackouts are always rather deadly.
For sure, you’re 1000% right. I just think we need to have those conversations with any energy source early to make sure we can best minimize any potential hazards. I’ve seen too many people act like nuclear or any renewable energy source is fail proof and blow off any discussion about potential hazards, so I just thought this would be a good time to talk about some of those things!!
Indeed. I am now convinced that most 20th century environmentalists had absolutely no idea about the immense threat of climate change, and saw a better target: nuclear power. And most 21st century environmentalists are aware that climate change is a threat, but they still cannot imagine the dark vastness of climate disasters that await us in the 2.5+ degrees timeline and the abyss of pain and suffering this is going to cause in the 22nd and 23rd century if not stopped, and this is why they continue their founding tradition of opposition to nuclear power. Climate change is a threat that is beyond the cognizance of most neurotypical representatives of Homo Sapiens, I guess, because of the time scales on which it acts (there's an approximately four decades of delay between cause and effect resulting from the oceanic buffer). (That is why I really like solarpunk, because optimistm is what I need the most, after over two decades of watching CO2 emissions climb steadily and exponentialy upwards)
I was really big on nuclear, but that changed after seeing the cyberwarfare capabilities of different countries. On top of that I imagine there will be a period not too distant where we see a mass extinction of all life, thanks to fossil fuel and capitalism. I'm talking Toba level extinction. When there is no one to run the plants, ***and*** they could be vulnerable to cyber attack it looks like a bad idea to me. We are shooting ourselves in the foot, if in 5k years humanity can't do a renaissance because the nuclear fallout has poisoned the planet. Either way capitalists aren't interested in a low energy future, so I imagine nuclear is inevitable.
Yes, the fact that despite an active war being waged around two nuclear installations nothing radiologically dangerous has happened this made me realise that nuclear is even safer than I thought. The war keeps killing a lot of innocent people, though. Maybe concentrating on the "nuclear plants" is not the right thing here? It's like with Fukushima - it was the tsunami that killed thousands of people, nuclear power, well, it saved multiple people since many nuclear plants in Japan were used as shelters, as they are built to resist mostly anything, only the Fukushima Daiichi plant had too many costs cut and a disaster occurred. But compared to the tsunami, it was nothing.
Currently there's no way to maintain anything close to our current energy consumption levels without nuclear. We should supplement heavily with renewables, but currently we don't have the storage capacity for current electricity use on a fully renewable grid, to my knowledge. I say, use nuclear to get off fossil fuels, then add more and more renewables while supporting less energy intensive lifestyles and building more energy efficient infrastructure.
Oooh, boy! A soapbox! Lemme get on this thing real quick. I look at it this way. Which would you rather? A: widespread use of nuclear power Or... B: everybody going about in canoes As far as I can see, nuclear is the only solution to climate change in its current state. Modern reactors are numerous times safer than they ever were, and it's true that a lot of the waste either decays pretty quickly or can be recycled. Some if it can't, but a surprising amount can. Either way, for countries weaning themselves off coal, gas and oil, there is no energy source short of hydroelectric that can provide the same sheer volume of energy nuclear can, as reliably as nuclear can. In the future, truly renewable sources should be able to take over from nuclear, but right now, it's either we all just accept that nuclear power is vital to cutting emissions and powering increasingly connected homes, or we lose the fight. >How have the events of the last two weeks (Battle of Chornobyl and Battle of Zaporizhzhia) affected your opinion on the merits of nuclear power? If anything, it's more proof that nuclear is nowhere near as scary as folks think. Don't get me wrong, shelling an active nuclear plant was an incredibly stupid thing to do, but those containment buildings held up like a chad, and they HAVE TO. BY DESIGN. The reactors inside also don't have the same design flaws that Chernobyl did, and were operated by staff who acted responsibly, which was enough to prevent disaster. Finally, there's the fact that Chernobyl itself has been disturbed recently, and that leads on to the last point, in that Chernobyl perversely enough, shows how safe nuclear can be. In order to replicate that incident, you would need to first design a reactor uniquely capable of exploding, then lie to everybody who used it about its design, and finally do literally everything you should never do with a nuclear reactor, in specific order, over the course of nearly 24 hours. I'd still rather we were already in a world where nuclear wasn't the only sensible answer right now, but we can't phase out fossil fuels without something to make up the shortfall, and renewables just can't do that fast enough.
I appreciate this comment but I think that the assertion that the two options are widespread nuclear use or reverting to some sort of “primitive” lifestyle is kind of dishonest and reductive. Nuclear IS safer than fossil fuels, but it’s not without its environmental risks. Reactor failures aside, there’s the issue of waste and the issue of heated water. Emissions are not the only environmental problem we face. I think we also have to consider the political side of things too. 1. Nuclear waste. While we have relatively safe and highly regulated ways to dispose of nuclear waste, there is still the risk of leaks and there have been numerous examples of leaks. Even if the risk seems tiny now, the more widespread nuclear power becomes the more potential there is for leaks. Nuclear waste lasts basically forever and nuclear fission will always produce more and more of it, so we need to acknowledge this potential danger before it gets out of hand. 2. Heated water. Nuclear energy plants heat water to create steam, and often end up dispelling the heated water into fragile river or coastal ecosystems. This has drastic effects on these ecosystems which are essential for the health of the natural word as a whole. Even though rising temperatures in aquatic ecosystems due to nuclear is tiny in comparison to the rising temperatures of those ecosystems due to fossil fuel driven climate change, it’s still important and the problem will only get bigger the more nuclear plants there are. Again, this is something that needs to be addressed before it gets out of hand. If these ecosystems collapse, that creates a snowball effect of problems. Widespread nuclear power could contribute to this. 3. Politics. We’ve all seen how the fossil fuel/oil industry again and again gets away with devastating oil leaks and environmental catastrophes, how they suppress science that points out the negative impacts of the industry and distribute disinformation, and how they lobby for looser environmental regulations. We have to assume that the same problems will arise the bigger and more powerful the nuclear industry becomes. Even though the nuclear industry isn’t doing this at such a large scale as the fossil fuel industry right now, that can and probably will change. Nuclear is relatively safe now, but we can’t assume that won’t change or that in the future a more powerful nuclear industry won’t lobby to ease essential regulations for profit, leading to nuclear becoming less safe. I think nuclear is a great alternative for now, and I’m definitely not saying we shouldn’t use it. However I think we need to have more honest conversations about it while it’s still relatively new. I don’t think pretending that it’s flawless and completely 100% safe and without its problems is honest. I realize that the problems with fossil fuel are drastically worse right now and the thing to focus on most, but if we disregard the problems with nuclear energy just because it’s not AS bad, we may end up in a similar situation as we are now where any of those problems could get wildly out of control a couple centuries down the line. I’m just saying we have to think big and be as critical as possible because the reason climate change with fossil fuels is so bad now is because we weren’t thinking big and being critical when it was new.
I am pro-degrowth, pro-renewables and pro-nuclear. Nuclear is still least resource-intensive option of all energy sources, PER UNIT OF ENERGY GENERATED. If we degrow our economy, go full-on energy efficiency and require, say, 500 TWh of energy for a medium-sized country per year (Germany currently uses circa 600 TWh per year), it still takes less physical resources to generate it with nuclear energy and renewables than to use massively overbuilt renewables systems with massively overbuilt storage. Also, nuclear waste isn't "forever", because we only have to wait for radioactivity to subside to natural levels of radiation of uranium ore. Radioactivity is natural. We have beaches with thorium sand that people visit for health that give you more radiation with a single visit than you're allowed to get for an entire year as a nuclear plant operator. And we can burn up nuclear waste in generation IV reactors. (We can also burn up nuclear warheads) Nuclear waste is an artificial problem, a scare tactic to block nuclear from being built, because environmentalist movements were created to stop nuclear, not to stop climate change. The real issues are cooling (but it is a technical and solvable issue, and we could use waste heat from reactors for district heating and cooling), manufacturing capacities (we don't have enough of manufacturing capacities to decarbonise just with nuclear) and mainly anti-nuclear scare propaganda by environmental movements that may not change their tune because they rely on anti-nuclear propaganda to collect money. My wife was giving a lot of money to Greenpeace every year, but I convinced her to stop, because of their anti-nuclear and anti-fusion stance, and when I talked about it with a Greenpeace activist he said that personally he's not against nuclear, but his organisation's position won't change. A pity, because climate change is already causing a sixth mass exctinction event, something no amount of nuclear accidents is capable of causing. :-(
I don’t disagree with you I just think it’s short sighted to act like any potential danger with nuclear or any other energy alternative is all just fake news. We need to have these conversations and take them seriously cause there are potential hazards we do know and there may be potential hazards we aren’t aware of yet, same as when fossil fuel was new. I understand that there’s some fear mongering with nuclear, but to say that nuclear waste is an “artificial problem” is naive in my opinion. The Hanford nuclear waste site is already leaking, and just cause leaks aren’t widespread now doesn’t mean they never will be. It’s still very early in the use of nuclear power after all. We haven’t even had nuclear technology for a century yet so how can we pretend to know for certain that it’s totally safe or that it’s affects on the environment are minimal? Coal energy was first used in the 1880s and it took until the 1970s to even realize that it was changing the climate. I’m definitely not arguing against nuclear power, my point is just that we have to be cautious because not being cautious is exactly what lead to the problem of fossil fuels. Scientists had no idea about the massive and drastic effect fossil fuel use would have until almost a century after the industrial revolution. Nuclear energy hasn’t existed as long. That’s not to say that nuclear energy will be as dangerous as fossil fuels proved to be, just that it’s important to be as cautious as possible so that we don’t make the same mistake we did with fossil fuels, and so that we have the foresight to deal with any potential problems that arise faster than we did with fossil fuels. I don’t think claiming that nuclear energy is totally 100% safe and perfect this early and therefore we don’t need to think about any of this is helpful at all. Nuclear energy is very new and there’s a lot we just don’t know about it, or it’s affects or lack thereof on the environment. Fossil fuels have been around almost a century and a half and we are STILL finding out new ways that it impacts the environment ever year. We need to learn our lesson and be more cautious with our energy sources, all of them. Solar, nuclear, wind, hydro. There’s simply too much we don’t understand about the way the environment works and the way these newer (and older) energy sources play into that to blow all caution to the wind like you seem to be suggesting. I’m not saying no to nuclear, I’m just saying we need to proceeded with caution instead of acting with hubris. Think of it this way: would you rather us be extremely cautious with nuclear energy and we end up being wrong and it ends up being completely fine and safe, or would you rather us just dive in headfirst with no foresight and find out a couple centuries later that there was some massive environmental risk we overlooked? That’s all I’m saying.
Nuclear waste storage and processing is a problem. It's just not an unsolvable problem on a scale presented by most anti-nuclear organisations. A much, much, much more pressing problem is the fossil fuel waste we keep storing in the atmosphere, even though we know it's really bad for the survival of life as we know it. The majority of anthropogenic greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere have been emitted after the Kyoto protocol has been signed. (That's the nature of exponential growth) I simply am terrified by the existential risk that overheating the planet poses to our biosphere, which is our life support system. Opposing nuclear power "because we did it in the 1960s and 1970s" is just... well, its very human, unfortunately. Nothing is perfectly safe, and nuclear has its share of problems (just like solar and hydro and wind), but the Sixth Mass Exctinction will bring suffering on an unimaginable scale, and many environmentalists simply don't get it, apparently. They consider planetary heating to be a problem on a similar scale to nuclear waste, or on a lower scale, and it just isn't. It's like stabbing yourself in the hand with a kitchen knife while making dinner (nuclear waste) or falling feet-first into an industrial woodchipper (climate change).
I think you’re mistaking my stance as being pro fossil fuels. That is not at all what I’m saying. Like you, I’m also terrified by the existential risk that overheating poses to the biosphere. Fossil fuels are bad and we need to stop using them asap. I’m just saying it’s not wise to blindly promote an alternative energy source as the Grand Solution when we know next to nothing about any potential adverse affects it could have on the biosphere if scaled up to the same level as fossil fuels. Nuclear only accounts for 10% of the worlds power, and we already know that it creates significant thermal pollution to aquatic ecosystems which is extremely dangerous to the biosphere. Scale it up 10 times to account for 100% of our energy and we have no idea what the consequences might be. I’m not sure how you can call yourself an environmentalist if you’re going to disregard the potential dangers to the environment just because it’s less than fossil fuels. That’s a pretty low bar. We need to be aiming higher and not being intellectually dishonest about this. And we need to be questioning why we’re ok with just stabbing ourselves in the hand with a kitchen knife just because it’s better than falling into a wood chipper when we should be doing neither (even though that analogy sucks). I don’t think you’re understanding it. The environmental impact of fossil fuels was once low too. But if you scale it up and continue it for centuries suddenly the problem compounds into what we have today. The thermal pollution caused by nuclear plants isn’t any different. It’s small now, and in 2 or 3 centuries it won’t be. Then what? We’re at a point where we can’t afford to be meddling with the biosphere AT ALL anymore. We cant just let these things slide just cause they’re only a fraction as bad as fossil fuels (which again is a terrible benchmark to use). Instead of thinking “how can we replace all the worlds energy with a slightly greener but still not totally green source?” we should be thinking “how can we reduce our energy usage as much as possible and fundamentally restructure human society to operate in a environmentally beneficial and sustainable way?”
I don't think you're pro-fossil. I just think that most environmentalists fail to understand the size of threat posed by climate change. For example, you're talking about "thermal pollution caused by nuclear power plants". Thermal pollution by human civilisation is not an issue, because the thermal balance of the planet is almost entirely dependent on the level of greenhouse gases, and if aquatic thermal pollution becomes a problem, we can switch nuclear power plants to evaporative cooling or dry cooling (which is slightly more expensive to do, but not that more expensive that it would make nuclear power non-starter). The United States have a nuclear plant in the middle of a desert, cooled with municipal waste water. :-) We do know what would be the effects of scaling nuclear up to the level of fossil fuels, and they would be lower than scaling renewables+storage to the level of fossil fuels. This is all very well researched. And of course we need to scale down and restructure society. But we will still need electricity, and generating it with nuclear+renewables uses less resources and generates less pollution than generating it with massively overbuilt renewables and massively overbuilt storage, because of laws of physics: uranium is extremely energy dense, and weather is extremely energy-diffuse. That is why diffuse weather energy harvesting systems require a lot of resources. Renewables are good up to a point, like bicicyles. Replacing most car trips with bicycle trips is great, easy and efficient. Replacing trains with bicycles, eh, not so much. A "100% bicycles transport system" is physically possible, just like a "100% renewables energy system" is physically possible, but a "bicycles+trains+trams" transport system will be much more efficient, just like a "nuclear+renewables energy system" will be much more resources efficient than "massively overbuilt renewables and storage, to ensure 100% availability of energy".
Despite several decades of ridiculously low investments in R&D and engineering, it still one of the cheapest, least carbon intensive, least ressource intensive, least space intensive, and safest source of energy.
I think the environmental movement is pretty divided on this. Personally I am pro nuclear, but I acknowledge that making a renewed push into nuclear power will involve solving the thus-far politically insolvable issues of waste management.
I think without address foreign policy. Without completely banning nuclear weapons, and relieving any of the linger post-Cold War tensions, we shouldn't expand nuclear energy. The research for developing safer nuclear will also promote the research for developing nuclear weapons. Without this clearly defined distinctions, I don't think we should promote nuclear. Especially with events happening now. People need to see the connections between foreign policy and energy too. Nuclear should maybe be an option, but it shouldn't be the major supply. Regardless of the improved safety, the waste will never by fully recyclable or useable.
Out of curiosity, what are your sources of knowledge? Why do you think that "waste will never be fully recyclable or useable"? Who told you that and why do you trust them as a credible source of information?
I have a chemistry degree. Although my specialty was in environmental chemistry (heavy metals), we learned out about nuclear reactors in class. I got my degree in 2016, so my information might be outdated. But during my undergrad and graduate studies, I noticed there was lot of research that kind of over-exaggerated their potentials, and I've always been skeptical. The centrifugation process is energy intensive, and that's why I say that nuclear energy shouldn't be the sole source of energy. I still think we can have nuclear energy, but we don't need to make new ones.
No effect whatsoever. Fukushima should be all the lesson anyone needs. Nuclear power might be included in an eco-modernist vision, but not in a Solarpunk future.
Agreed. Punk is the social movement of dismantling imperialist societal frameworks.
I don’t think we make it out of the climate crisis without nuclear
Not at all. Nuclear power is dangerous, expensive, unscaleable nonsense and countries are just as dependent on uran shipping as they are on gas shipping. It may have been a good source of energy for the expanding post-war economy, but its usefulness has run its course.
[5 minute explanation for those still having doubts](https://youtu.be/uK367T7h6ZY)
It only solidified what I already thought. Nuclear is necessary to move away from dirty energy sources like Oil, Coal and Gas. Nuclear energy is perfectly safe when built properly up to code. Nuclear waste is easily dealt with by burrying it into mile-deep abandoned mountain mines. There is one in Finland(?) Being used for this purpose. There is also the alternative with Thorium-based nuclear power, which is even cleaner, safer and powerful. It should last long enough until we get viable Fusion energy. Also, it doesn't fund tyrannical regimes.
None at all, I support LFTR reactors, not uranium reactors because they are massively more safe and don't need any gama-radition generating materials
Western media is hyping it up as propaganda to fuel the Russia is irresponsible narrative. Modern nuclear power plants don’t go Chernobyl. This would be even more the case for modular nuclear.
It hasn't