Fossil fuels produce terrible waste we store in the air that we breathe.
Terrible waste that we store in our lungs
Yes, but when things go wrong, the boom is relatively small and contained.
We can’t run a regular coal or natural gas power plant here without fucking it up and getting people killed. Despite the safety of modern plant designs, I do NOT trust the people in charge here with fissile material.
Go lookup CANDU reactors, we have designs already that can’t steam explode themselves and instead will fail safe. Also just to be clear nuclear reactors don’t perform a nuclear explosion if they fail, the Chernobyl explosion was a steam explosion that threw nuclear material into the air.
The level of incompetence I’ve grown to expect of my state government would suggest that they’d have fissile material delivered and stored in a leaky shed, where it will create runoff which contaminates the local reservoir, before a crackhead steals it, takes it to the scrapyard, and it is never seen again.
Or we could just use solar with none of those risks but still using the largest nuclear reaction around.
…and rendered an area the size of a county unsuitable for humans for hundreds of generations.
You’re going to have to show me a government that isn’t half-full of people who hate education, who hate science, and most of all who hate accountability before I vote for more nuclear power.
You know, the beautiful thing about being a society is we can all just agree to regulate them. I think that’s called a government.
Like I said, we can’t/won’t effectively regulate the power plants we have now.
Our government is only good for generating moral panics and building roads. I hope that changes one day, but it has been getting worse for a long time, so I won’t hold my breath for it to all be fixed tomorrow.
That’s fair, I wasn’t giving you the benefit of the doubt, that’s my bad
Yes, but when things go wrong, the boom is relatively small and contained.
Not so: https://daily.jstor.org/the-tragedy-at-buffalo-creek/
That’s why people prefer driving over flying, right? If something goes wrong, the boom is small and contained.
Never mind that planes are much safer and efficient at travelling long distance.
When things go wrong? When things go right for coal and gas plants, the “boom” is a humanity-threatening event that already in its extremely early stages has been named the Holocene Extinction.
I don’t think even one of those fast fission reactors is still in operation. Wonder why that is.
Because, it does not destroy all waste, despite a cartoon claiming as such and gullible people falling for it? Even “short-term” waste needs to be stored somewhere for about 500 years. Sure, it ain’t like the others in terms of length of time but anyone who thinks that is a cheap fact or trivial is an idealogue. Since they can exist at both extremes.
So the issue of the water table or general environmental contamination is not addressed the way OP claims. There are also higher costs and higher grade fuel is required. Not to say that there are not some advantages but the cartoon is just plain incorrect and taking a toodler’s view on some serious concerns. The Wikipedia article has a list of disavantages for anyone to look into.
They’re politically unpopular, more expensive than fossil fuels, and most of them are prototypes.
India and China each have one. Russia has 3.
I blame Nixon for why nuclear power in the US sucks. He axed research on any reactor types that didn’t produce plutonium for weapons, including thorium reactors. Hope he’s rotting in hell.
According to the future-documentary Futurama, his head is in a jar somewhere, waiting to assume the presidency once again with the headless body of Spiro Agnew.
Nah, they also depict Henry Kissinger that way, but we all know he’s dragging what’s left of his body across a minefield in hell.
According to Wikipedia there are a few, with more planned. But not nearly enough. IMO, we should switch over to Fast Reactors as standard.
Canada has CANDU breeder reactors, still in use. They also produce the majority of medical isotopes.
CANDU reactors are pressurized heavy-water reactors not Fast-neutron reactors.
Yeah, I thought about it after and realized it was probably a different tech, but the point is reliable breeder reactors are possible, and certain medical tech is reliant on their existence.
Since there are economic, ecological, conceptual and engineering problems, only five Fast-neutron reactors are operational at the moment. Three in Russia, one in India and one in China. Not surprisingly these are countries that also have an interest in producing weapons grade Plutonium, which FNRs are capable of.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2968/066003007
https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-breeder-reactor
https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs15glaser.pdf
https://energypost.eu/slow-death-fast-reactors/
https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/report/And while nuclear energy production peaked 1996 at 17% and was nowhere near overtaking fossil energy production in it’s 70(!) year long existence, Renewables will overtake fossil fuel power production in 2025, with only minute risks for the biosphere.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/renewable-power-set-to-surpass-coal-globally-by-2025/
https://www.renewable-ei.org/pdfdownload/activities/REI_NuclearReport_201902_EN.pdfSo why cling to an outdated technology when there are viable solutions at hand, which are nowhere as complicated and dangerous as nuclear fission? It’s the monetary interest of a dying nuclear industry and its lobbyists.
It’s not really needed. Waste is a boogeyman, but not really a problem. It takes an incredibly small volume to store the waste, and it can be reduced with reprocessing to run in the exact same reactors.
At some point in the future when there actually is a huge amount of waste causing issues, then it might make sense to build a reactor to use it.
when there actually is a huge amount of waste
Over 60,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel are stored across Europe (excluding Russia and Slovakia), most of which in France (Table 1). Within the EU, France accounts for 25 percent of the current spent nuclear fuel, followed by Germany (15 percent) and the United Kingdom (14 percent). Spent nuclear fuel is considered high-level waste. Though present in comparably small volumes, it makes up the vast bulk of radioactivity.
~ 2019 https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/
Last “brilliant” plan I heard was dumping it in a hole deep enough we’d never need, nor be able to recover it.
A quick question . Other than a suprisingly lot of complexity involved in diggin the hole of sufficient size and depth why wouldnt it work ( or is that the reason )?
It would work. Much like every other sweeping of something under the rug, hiding it elsewhere for it to be a problem later always works for the person throwing it away.
After all, why would we ever wish to extract the remaining U238 from the spent fuel? We utilised a full 4%, let’s call that square and throw the rest down a hole. Perish the thought we’ll ever need to dig near this massive radioactive hole. Or that an undiscovered cycle of nature causes it to come back to bite us. Just throw it down there with the rest of the resources we never want to safely explore, and who cares if there’s something valuable within it’s sphere of radioactivity.
Apologies for the sarcasm. I consider the idea both wasteful and foolish.
I’m a fan of both Thorium and Molten-Salt Reactors.
So a hole with an elevator then?
If you like hauling hundreds of tons of waste up and down an elevator? Maybe. Who does maintenance every so often at the bottom of the shaft?
It would work, they’re just a hater.
Weight is a way to make the problem sound worse than it is, because nuclear waste is so incredibly dense. It’s not enough to be a big deal yet. Dumping it deep into the ocean is an option, but it’s only going to happen to waste that doesn’t have potential uses first.
nuclear waste is so incredibly dense
Yes and no. Most current fuels are Uranium or Plutonium. Both between 19 and 20 g/cm3. For reference, liquid water is approximately 1 g/cm3. Unspent fuel is a similar weight to gold.
“Spent” U238 is usually around 96% U238. If we consider the remainder a rounding error and assume all 60 tonnes is 60 million kg of U238. That will give us a very rough estimate of 3,000 m3.
Also worthy of noting are other wastes that comes from mining and refining.
There is much waste already. The “spent” waste is too radioactive to safely re-refine until later.
Have a look at the size of the Finnish waste repository.
“They’ll hold a total of 5,500 tonnes of waste,” says Joutsen. “So Onkalo will take all the high-level nuclear waste produced by Finland’s five nuclear power plants in their entire life cycles.”
The Finnish repository is designed with a life of 100,000 years. Homo sapiens (i.e us) have existed for about 300,000 years.
Article about the problems warnings that will comprehensible in 10,000 years https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time
So nuclear plants of the future won’t be run by companies who cut important corners on safety to maximize shareholder profits while offloading the consequences to the government and public?
I hear the argument being made that companies shouldn’t be allowed to run a nuclear power plant, or any infrastructure for that matter.
I mean that’s how things work in China with state owned companies. I don’t see why everybody shouldn’t be doing that.
Good news: America already does it too!
No they’ll be run by companies that own everything around them as well, and are naturally incentivized to avoid failures.
Government subsidizing this crap is why it’s built so cheap.
The problem with Nuclear Power is that people with strong opinions about it either way are some of the most annoying you’ll ever see.
The trick is to force them really close to one another.
Or just bury it miles underground in the desert, but for some fucking reason a state is as likely to store it upstream in a concrete shack as they are to ship it to the mojave where the pit is literally already dug out and designated.
Legal says don’t touch the nuclear waste
You don’t want to be the guy who fucks that up
The fact that any nuclear power plant has ever ran anyways is because unspent nuclear materials were transported to the facility. We as a society should have the means to transport these things safely in large sealed containers. The only feasible downside to this idea is that the containers will eventually heat up, so chop fucking chop mates. Get it there.
If nuclear stops getting outstripped by renewables on cost I might be more interested in it.
Only when you don’t include grid storage
Yeah that is problem. It did just make me think though: I read recently about a UK project to build a solar farm in the Moroccan desert the size of greater London and lay undersea cables all the way back to southwest England. They claim it will be half the cost of the new Hinkley C reactor, which is just up the road and that includes building from scratch the ship to lay the cables. Now, instead of having this solar farm to the south, in a similar timezone, what if it could be to the east or west? There is already an international grid in this part of the world, so perhaps if it was extended, there could be renewable energy coming in from wherever, whenever it was being produced. The sun is usually out and the wind blowing somewhere. That would reduce the burden of storage. It would also require a high level of cooperation and trust, which has its pros and cons.
If you think about it, the energy coming in from the sun and either heating the ground or stirring the air is constant. A big enough collection network would transmit that underlying steady signal eventually.
Just remember that Low level Radioactive Waste is a thing, unless there’s a fast reactor that runs on smocks and used syringes
This is the thing a lot of people don’t understand. The vast majority of radioactive waste isn’t fuel. It’s cladding, PPE, etc
Correct time was 40 years ago when renewable were worse. Instead we built coal and gas generally. Now the worst people want nuclear, except they don’t actually want it, they just use it as a cudgel to not build any green infrastructure
It’s so annoying that being irrationality afraid of nuclear power is simply assumed to be a leftist position where I live, by leftists and non-leftists alike. No thought goes into it, nuclear power is scary because of nuclear bombs and Chernobyl and that’s it.
Where are these fast Reactors?
Nuclear power is still the most expensive way to produce electricity by a large margin.
Sure, we could save ourselves from extinction, but what about shareholder value?
It’s more expensive than solar, wind and batteries, though. Not just coal or gas.
It is not.
And there is no large margin.
Referencing several sources that consider a vast array of power generation technologies, from offshore wind to biomass, terrestrial wind, solar, gas, coal and nuclear, and nuclear energy has high start up costs and it’s also not the cheapest per megawatt of power. It’s basically middle of the road on most of the stats I’ve seen.
Solar, by comparison, has had a much higher LCOE as recently as 5-10 years ago. Most power construction projects take longer than that to plan and build, then operate for decades. Until the last few years, solar hasn’t even be a competitor compared to other options.
Beyond direct cost nuclear has been one of very few green energy sources, the nuclear materials are contained and safely disposed of. Unless there’s a serious disaster, it’s one of the most ecologically friendly forms of energy. The only sources better are hydroelectric, and geothermal. The only “waste” from nuclear is literal steam, and some limited nuclear waste product. A miniscule amount compared to the energy produced.
Last time I checked, all of the nuclear waste that’s ever been produced can fit in an area the size of a football field, with room to spare. For all the energy produced, it’s very small.
Yet, because of stuff like Chernobyl and Fukushima, everyone seems to hate it.
I live in Ontario, Canada, our entire power infrastructure is hydroelectric and nuclear. I’m proud of that.
Nuclear isn’t the demon that people believe it is.
LCOE of solar is lower than nuclear for eleven years now. Wind has had lower LCOE than nuclear for 14 years now. See figure 52.
Building a new nuclear power plant takes 9-12 years on average. Hinkley Point C in southeast England was announced in 2008 (16 years ago) and is projected to be finished in 2028, with costs now being estimated around $40 billion. These long realisation times are not a european issue alone, as Korea’s Shin-Hanul-1-2 faces similar problems.
Safely storing nuclear waste is expensive, too.
Maybe I shouldn’t step in this but here it goes. My personal opinion is that nuclear isn’t good or bad, it’s an option that’s available. I have never heard a nuclear activist say that nuclear energy is superior to renewables. It’s not black and white, it’s all a complex mix of demands and limitations that dictate if renewables are better for an area or nuclear. It’s a whole lot of gray, but nuclear energy isn’t as dangerous as some make it out to be.
Your comment is valid, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
I wouldn’t say that nuclear is the best option, nor cleanest, nor safest. Like anything, it’s all circumstantial. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes other options are simply better.
From what I’ve seen, nuclear is the best for base load on a grid scale. Basically: the load that the grid continually has, is well served by nuclear. To my understanding, most nuclear generation is fairly slow to ramp up and down, compared to other technologies, so keeping it at a relatively steady level, with minor adjustments and changes through the day as required, is the best use case for it. It’s stable and consistent, which is to say it doesn’t vary based on external factors, like the weather, where solar/wind are heavily influenced by external factors.
It’s entirely on a case by case basis.
You’re right, you shouldn’t have stepped in. At least,you shouldn’t have stepped in and build a strawman. The discussion you entered is about costs, not dangers.
You’re wrong, I didn’t talk about dangers and I didn’t put up a strawman. If you wanted to pin a logical fallacy on my argument you should have said I made a generalization fallacy or an informally fallacy because I was so vague. It’s actually pretty telling that you’re attributing a lot of intention where there was none. I am not going to spend the time or energy to make a legitimate argument with some random jerk on the internet that ultimately just gets us Internet points. I have more important things to do with my time.
And honestly my only reason for posting is to make the comment number go up one tick to keep these communities going. I really don’t care about what you think and unless you’re in a position of power no one else does either.
Edit: I’ll downvote myself, I don’t approve of anyone behaving like either of us.
Your one and only fact-related statement was literally
but nuclear energy isn’t as dangerous as some make it out to be.
But sure, you weren’t talking about dangers lol.
You’re right, I was careless. It wasn’t a strawman though. It’s still a generalization or informality fallacy. If you’re going to head in so hot at least have use the right terms.
No. And pretending it is longer for solar is false too. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf
Thanks, that LCOE reference shows that nuclear is on par with several other technologies.
It thoroughly disproves the point that it is more expensive “by a large margin”. At most it’s a bit more costly than some things, but it’s also not far off from some other options, so it’s definitely not expensive… At least not by a large margin.
Yet, because of stuff like Chernobyl and Fukushima, everyone seems to hate it.
Is that a bad reason really? When nuclear goes bad it goes really bad and it can go bad due to human error which is something that will always be present. When a solar panel catastrophically fails it doesn’t render the surrounding environment uninhabitable for decades.
The thing is, nuclear problems are big and scary events, but they’re rare.
Think like plane crash vs other transportation accidents: they make bigger news, but they’re actually safer than most other solutions.
Here’s the data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
It does seem that your solar example is the one thing that’s safer than nuclear sccording to this chart though, so maybe you knew!
I’m not just talking about deaths though. If a bad nuclear accident happens it makes a large part of the surrounding area uninhabitable and the fallout in the air can cause long term very nasty health problems for a lot of people. If that happened near a big city the results would be devastating. Considering that the other clean energy options are comparable in terms of danger per output during general operation it just doesn’t seem worth it. Obviously I’m not a nuclear engineer and maybe I need to read up on it more but that’s my current thoughts on the matter.
As for the rarity, they may be but we are operating on an indefinite time scale. Sooner or later something is going to happen again with how complex those things are. Especially with corporations involved that are more concerned with making their stocks go up than keeping people safe. Here’s a better explanation of what I’m talking about - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_accident
Those are very good points.
This specific source doesn’t highlight it and I don’t have the opportunity to find something else at the moment, but when I first heard about it ( in a ted talk that I can’t remember the name of… ) they had highlighted that health complications followed similar curves. The worsts of course being burning stuff due to dumping it in the air, but that most renewables had their lot of injuries too, that their just less publicized.
Here’s my full take of nuclear/renewables
My understanding is that most power grid depending on renewables need an alternate energy source for when power demands ramp up: they need some energy sources that they can tune depending of needs, at the drop of a hat.
Hydro does that, you can let more or less water through. (I happen to live aomewhere where most of our energy is Hydro) Things like wind or solar are more complicated.
As an energy appoint source, I think nuclear is a good fit for some use cases.
You took the words right out of my mouth.
You got downvored for truth. That’s pretty sad tbh
Yeah, sometimes the pro nuclear bubble feels a bit like crypto bros lol
I’m gonna be real, that’s cause it’s the same guys
No. It’s because you guys are wrong. Nuclear is more expensive than the others only if the others get subsidies but Nuclear doesn’t.
In Canada, Québec is 100% hydro, Ontario is 75% nuclear (the rest is hydro). Yet both provinces have some of the cheapest kWh rates in the western world.
That’s definitely not true in any way shape or form.
In your own article it says “With existing policies wind and solar are cheaper” Yes, Nuclear is more expensive because the others are subsidized. The article seems to acknowledge that, but only applies the metrics to the price of subsidized wind farms. Unless I misinterpreted the article.
It’s not a matter of subsidising. It’s a matter for of approvals processes.
Nuclear is more expensive than the others only if the others get subsidies but Nuclear doesn’t.
That is straight up wrong, the opposite is true. England’s Hinkley Point C for example has a Contract for Difference, the british government pays a guaranteed price per kWh so their citizens pay less.
It’s almost like a for-profit utilities company will… go for profit.
Really bad example.
That’s completely beside the point. You said, renewables were only cheaper because they’re subsidized. I proved you wrong and showed that nuclear is subsidized. That has nothing to do with companies being for-profit.
deleted by creator
It’s common in pseudo-social media sites. Take commentless downvores as a badge of honour. Take fallacious-comment downvores as a hot badge of honour.
This comic is pretty bad. It oversimplifies both positions to the point of complete triviality, then uses it to mock a group of people. The comic is not insightful, or funny, or representative or any real people in any sense. It’s basically just a jab at some people that the author doesn’t like.
Ralph Nader interview goes into details on nuclear power
KPFA - The Ralph Nader Radio Hour: America, Stop With the Nuclear Power. It’s Not Going to Happen.
Episode webpage: https://kpfa.org/program/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour/
Media file: https://archives.kpfa.org/data/20240318-Mon1100.mp3
then why aren’t we already doing that? Probably it’s not as cost-effective? nuclear power is already crazy expensive.
That being said a very small amount of nuclear I’m fine with, just to make up for renewable fluctuation until we figure out power storage
China is doing it, but I can’t tell you why the west is so backwards.
Here’s some reading material: https://www.bmk.gv.at/en/topics/climate-environment/nuclear-coordination/fairy-tales.html
here’s some more reading material from a country that actually knows what it’s talking about https://www.caea.gov.cn/english/n6759365/n6759369/c6792804/content.html
