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It’s sad that the coal lobby has convinced so many people that the most reliable clean energy source we’ve ever discovered is somehow bad.
I feel this is all moot. When we run out of fossil fuels and go off the energy cliff, the nuclear facilities will basically build themselves, assuming there will be anyone around that will even know how to build a nuclear reactor
There is a huge lobby of pro-nuclear think tanks who try to astroturf pro-nuclear shit onto social media. We, scientifically literate, rational people, need to counteract these harmful narratives with some facts.
FACT: Renewable sources of energy are as cheap or cheaper per kwh than nuclear.
FACT: Renewables are faster to provision than nuclear.
FACT: Renewables are as clean, or cleaner, than nuclear.
FACT: Renewables are much more flexible and responsive to energy fluctuations than nuclear.
FACT: Renewables will only get cheaper. Nuclear will only get more expensive, because uranium mining will get harder and harder as we deplete easily accessible sources.
You don’t actually need to mine more uranium though. You can run certain nuclear designs on Thorium, Plutonium from weapon stocks, or even waste from other reactors. Current generation nuclear designs are laughably inefficient at using the nuclear fuels we have available, and I fully understand why people don’t support them.
Realistically though I don’t ever expect nuclear fission to be as cheap as renewables in most areas. In some places nuclear or another power source is always going to be needed though just because renewables are not practical in certain conditions.
In the long term the answer is almost certainly going to be nuclear fusion or another future power source like neutrino voltaic. Solar and wind power are ultimately just offshoots of fusion, and so is fission if you think about where uranium, thorium and so on come from. In fact all power we know of seems to come from either gravity or some kind of nuclear reaction (inc. geothermal and fossil fuels).
Notice how pro-nuclear people always point towards a bunch of fictional technology as the solution? Oh, we just need fusion, or breeder reactors, or a bunch of other shit that doesn’t exist. No, bro, we just need to build renewables and proper energy grids. It’s really not that complicated. If it’s not sunny where you live, then you just get electricity from where it is sunny. It’s really really simple
Nuclear energy is a solution looking for a problem. Total tech bro bullshit. Like crypto.
Renewables folks are also always looking for things that don’t exist. Like magical energy storage and transmission solutions that don’t cost the earth or have huge losses. Or wave power which still hasn’t materialized after decades of research.
Breeder reactors already exist??? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Notable_reactors
Moving electricity around is a hard problem. Even just moving energy from one end of Britain to the other looses us 10 or 20%, and we are a small nation. If you need to start moving energy in from somewhere actually sunny like Spain you are going to have a big problem.
Crypto isn’t looking for a problem, fiat has plenty of problems, it’s just not an optimal solution. Probably the real answer is not using money at all.
Fact: renewables take more land, that could be used for other purposes.
Fact: renewables by themselves cannot, and I mean CANNOT, be used alone. Unless you are willing to have a ridiculous over-provision. They depend on weather and have massive seasonal divergences. You need a base line power production to have a rational generation scheme.
Fact: nuclear have a higher cap for total production than renewables. As humanity needs more and more and more energy renewables (even destroying all our usable land) won’t be enough.
Fact: no everyone that doesn’t share your opinion is an “astrosuftist lobby” some of us can also think by ourselves. And some of us can ever think above the dogma of our political school of choice.
if 15% of the land used for parking spaces in the USA was instead used for renewables, that would generate enough electricity to power the whole country.
a report from the IEA showed that renewables CAN, and I mean CAN fully power the entire world. So take that one up with the experts. thanks!
nice brainwashing though!
Do you have the calculations for thar 15%? I’d love to fact check it.
Quick search didn’t found me that report from the iae. You should probably pass me a link so I can fact check it too.
My country is not the USA, we do not have those ridiculous parking places that you guys have. Still renewables takes a ridiculous amount of space. I shall now as the land where I grew up is totally changed due wind power installations. And we are at 50% renewable generation. I fear to think what would become of this land if it was a 100% (that would probably need to be not double the land but 3-4 or more times the land if we want to cover energy usage during not windy months)
I really think that the sweet spot would be about 30-40 nuclear and 70-60 renewables.
You really need to stop following political dogmas, and start thinking.
Can you reply to the other points too? Also, could you link that source, it’s very intriguing
I can’t, sorry - I blocked him for being a pro-nuclear shill. Rather than link to a specific study, because there are dozens at this point, I’ll instead just link you to a Wikipedia article that has plenty of references for you to explore - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
If you want to find studies, you can find them - there are actually quite a lot of 100% renewable energy feasibility studies that all seem to come to the conclusion that 100% renewable energy economy is completely achievable and viable with current technology. Many of them consider nuclear power to be a fossil fuel.
Ask a pro-nuclear guy to provide any source that doesn’t come from somewhere funded by the nuclear lobby and watch as they flail around ineffectually and then link you to some pro-nuclear lobby group anyways. It’s quite funny
The guy replied with reasonable arguments. You just don’t want to entertain that nuclear might have a place in some countries. Apparently wanting nuclear to make up less than half of energy generation is called being a shill.
Nuclear power is also not a fossil fuel. That’s ridiculous. It comes from elements naturally found on earth that are the product of nuclear fusion reactions in supernova. Not the result of plant matter decaying underground.
Do you not think there are pro-renewable lobbies too? There are lobbies for all power sources including fossil fuels, nuclear, and renewables. Can you link anything that doesn’t come from a pro-renewable lobby.
I hate this thread.
Anon is dumb. Anon forgets the nuclear waste. Anon also forgets that the plants for the magical rocks are extremely expensive. So much that energy won by these rocks is more expensive than wind energy and any other renewable.
Anon isn’t dumb, just simple. Nuclear energy can be the best solution for certain situations. While renewables are the better choice in every way, they’re effectiveness isn’t equally distributed. There are places where there just isn’t enough available renewable energy sources year round to supply the people living there. When energy storage and transmission methods are also not up to the task, nuclear becomes the best answer. It shouldn’t be the first answer people look to but it is an answer. An expensive answer but sometimes the best one.
Also nuclear waste doesn’t have to be a problem. If anyone was willing to cover the cost of burning it in a breeder reactor for power or burry it forever. It just is because it’s expensive.
When energy storage and transmission methods are also not up to the task, nuclear becomes the best answer.
Obviously, the best answer is to improve energy storage and transmission infrastructure. Why would we waste hundreds of millions on a stupid toy power plant when we could spend 10% of that money on just running decent underground cables.
You really don’t understand how expensive underground cables are. You know those big, huge steel transmission towers that you see lined up, hundreds in a row?
Those towers costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars each. And the reason they’re used is because that’s way cheaper than underground.
Shit - just the cable is a couple million per mile per cable.
Are you fucking serious? Nuclear power plants cost way fucking more than some cables. You people are fundamentally so unserious. Pull your head out of a reactor for ten seconds and take reality as it exists
mmmm sounds like someone has zero concept of the scale of the problem: ie how much cable we’d need to bury. Simmer down Tony Snark, you’re demonstrably less clever than the rest of the species’ experts in this.
Because superconductors are even more expensive than breeder reactors.
and breeder reactors are more expensive than faerie magic, I prefer to use technologies that are actually real rather than things I wish were real
You do realize that all that is also expensive, and limited? We haven’t invented room temperature superconductors yet, and battery technology is far from perfect. There is only so much lithium and cobalt in the entire world. Yes we can now use things like sodium, but that’s a technology that’s still young and needs more research before it’s full potential is realized. There is also a reason we have overground cables and not underground. Digging up all that earth is hella expensive.
But if the magic rocks (facility) cost more than creating energy from the water the magic rocks need for cooling…
.
Don’t feed the troll 💩As long as you don’t care when the electricity is produced
Nuclear: As long as you don’t care about the magic rocks once the magic has decayed to a level where they’re not boiling water anymore
Storage is a solvable problem. Whereas we don’t have the resources to power the world with nuclear plants.
Storage is a solvable problem
I’m not convinced it is. Storage technologies exist for sure, but the general public seems to grossly underestimate the scale of storage required to match grid demand and renewables only production.
I think you underestimate how much storage power is currently being build and how many different technologies are available. In Germany alone there currently are 61 projects planed and in the approval phase boasting a combined 180 Gigawatts of potential power until 2030. Those of them that are meant to be build at old nuclear power plants (the grid connection is already available there) are expected to deliver 25% of the necessary storage capacity. In addition all electric vehicles that are assumed to be on the road until 2030 add another potential 100GW of power.
Of course these numbers are theoretical as not every EV will be connected to a bidirectional charger and surely some projects will fail or delay, however given the massive development in this sector and new, innovative tech (not just batteries but f.e. a concrete ball placed 800m below sea level, expected to store energy extremely well at 5.8ct / kilowatt) there’s very much reason for optimism here.
It’s also a funny sidenote that France, a country with a strong nuclear strategy, frequently buys power from Germany because it’s so much cheaper.
It’s not just power that’s needed (MW), also stored energy (MWh).
Germany consumes on average 1.4TWh of electricity a day (1). Imagine bridging even a short dunkelflaute of 2 days.
Worldwide lithium ion battery production is 4TWh a year (2).
It’s also a funny sidenote that France, a country with a strong nuclear strategy, frequently buys power from Germany because it’s so much cheaper.
Isn’t that normal? The problems with renewables isn’t that they generate cheap power, when they are generating. Today windmills even need to be equipped with remote shutdown, to prevent overproduction.
The problems arise when they aren’t generating.
Another problem arises when you’re generation 63.688 after today and still have to keep maintaining deadly waste from nations that don’t exist anymore, because they produced “cheap” and “clean” energy for a couple of decades.
Come on, Jesus died like 2000 years ago, this stuff will haunt us for centuries. Arguing in favor of nuclear energy is just selfish and shortsighted.Your estimation goes way off because you still believe lithium ion to be the only viable solution. By now Sodium-Ion batteries are already installed even in EVs and can be produced without any critical resource like lithium.
And then of course there are all the other storage solution. Like I said, there even are storage solutions like concrete balls. Successfully tested in 2016, here an article from 2013.
By now it wouldn’t be wise to stifle this enormous emerging market of various technologies by using expensive, problematic technology (not just because the biggest producer of fuel rods is Russia).
I don’t think lithium ion is the only storage technology. I was using it for scale.
The most cost effective storage is pumped storage. But even that wouldn’t reach the scale necessary.
6 MWh pumped storage proof-of-concept won’t l, either.
The watthours is what gas is for. Germany’s pipeline network alone, that’s not including actual gas storage sites, can store three months of total energy usage.
…or at least that’s the original plan, devised some 20 years ago, Fraunhofer worked it all out back then. It might be the case that banks of sodium batteries or whatnot are cheaper, but yeah lithium is probably not going to be it. Lithium’s strength is energy density, both per volume and by weight, and neither is of concern for grid storage.
Imagine bridging even a short dunkelflaute of 2 days.
That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.
is what gas is for
Wouldn’t it be better to go fossil free. Given, you know, climate change. And the fact that the gas needs to be shipped all the way from the US.
That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.
Unless we use a different technology, that is not renewables + storage?
Another important note about France: They are the second country alongside Germany heavily pushing for an upscaled green hydrogen market in the EU. Because -just like renewables- nuclear production doesn’t match the demand pattern at all. Thus it’s completely uneconomical without long-term storage.
The fact that we seem to constantly discuss nuclear vs. renewables is proof that it’s mostly lobbying bullshit. Because in reality they don’t compete. It’s either renewables+short-term storage+long-term-term storage or renewables+nuclear+long-term storage. Those are the only two viable models.
upscaled green hydrogen market
That’s been the talk in town for 40 years now. Green hydrogen has never gotten beyond proof-of-concept.
The fact that we seem to constantly discuss nuclear vs. renewables is proof that it’s mostly lobbying bullshit.
Sadly, it’s because the political green parties available to me are anti-nuclear.
It’s either renewables+short-term storage+long-term-term storage or renewables+nuclear+long-term storage.
Why is nuclear+short term storage not an option, according to you?
Due to the recent nuclear hype uranium price will rise and keep in mind that the resource will not exceed a century.
Why is nuclear+short term storage not an option
Because cold winter days exist. Yes you can only build nuclear capacities for the average day and then short-term storage to match the demand pattern. But you would need to do so for the day(s) of the year with the highest energy demand, some cold winter work day. What do you do with those capacities the remaining year as throttling nuclear down is not really saving much costs (most lie in construction and deconstruction)?
No it’s about nuclear waste and where to store it, it’s about how expensive it is to build a nuclear power plant (bc of regulations so they don’t goo boom) and it’s about how much you have to subsidize it to make the electricity it produces affordable at all. Economically it’s just not worth it. Renewables are just WAY cheaper.
Funny how people think waste is why we don’t use nuclear power.
You noticed how we’re all fine breathing in poison and carcinogens? Still haven’t banned burning fossil fuels.
It’s a money problem and a PR problem
And much of the PR problem is related to waste. The main push towards alternative energy sources comes from people worried about the long term consequences of burning fossil fuels. These same people worry about the long term consequences of nuclear waste production, so nuclear sabotages itself on this front.
Exactly, bad PR.
Waste isn’t actually much of a problem - it’s just been portrayed as one.
No it’s about nuclear waste and where to store it,
Is this video inaccurate? This isn’t meant as a gotcha comment. https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k
Fire’s waste is just all particulates in the air which we all share.
Yeah but we got lungs to filter that all out … or smth idk how this works
Renewable are so cheap, especially when we don’t need as much energy! Fortunately we won’t need as much energy in winter now. :-)
Funny how nuclear power plants are taboo, but building thousands of nuclear warheads all over the globe is no issue.
Funny how building nuclear power plants that can only (if you have dipshits running them) kill a nearby city is taboo, but climate change that will kill everyone is acceptable to the moralists.
Funny how solar, wind, and batteries are way cheaper and faster to build yet people are still talking about nuclear.
Solar and wind are cheaper yes. Batteries, no. If batteries were that cheap and easy to place we’d have solved energy a long time ago. Currently batteries don’t hold a candle to live production, the closest you can get is hydro storage, which not everyone has, and can’t realistically be built everywhere.
Look at the stats. The second largest battery storage in the US (and the world) is located near the Moss Landing Power Plant. It provides a capacity of 3000 MWh with 6000 MWh planned (Which would make it the largest). That sounds like a lot, but it’s located next to San Jose and San Fransisco, so lets pick just one of those counties to compare. The average energy usage in the county of San Clara, which contains San Jose (You might need to VPN from the US to see the source) is 17101 GWh per year, which is about 46.8 GWh per day, or 46800 MWh. So you’d need 8 more of those at 6000 MWh to even be able to store a day’s worth of electricity from that county alone, which has a population of about 2 million people. And that’s not even talking about all the realities that come with electricity like peak loads.
For reference, the largest hydro plant has a storage capacity of 40 GWh, 6.6x more (at 6000 MWh above).
Relative to how much space wind and solar use, nuclear is the clear winner. If a country doesn’t have massive amounts of empty area nuclear is unmissable. People also really hate seeing solar and wind farm. That’s not something I personally mind too much, but even in the best of countries people oppose renewables simply because it ruins their surroundings to them. Creating the infrastructure for such distributed energy networks to sustain large solar and wind farms is also quite hard and requires personnel that the entire world has shortages of, while a nuclear reactor is centralized and much easier to set up since it’s similar to current power plants. But a company that can build a nuclear plant isn’t going to be able to build a solar farm, or a wind farm, and in a similar way if every company that can make solar farms or wind farms is busy, their price will go up too. By balancing the load between nuclear, solar, and wind, we ensure the transition can happen as fast and affordable as possible.
There’s also the fact that it always works and can be scaled up or down on demand, and as such is the least polluting source (on the same level as renewables) that can reliably replace coal, natural gas, biomass, and any other always available source. You don’t want to fall back on those when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. If batteries were available to store that energy it’d be a different story. But unless you have large natural batteries like hydro plants with storage basins that you can pump water up to with excess electricity, it’s not sustainable. I’d wish it was, but it’s not. As it stands now, the world needs both renewables and nuclear to go fully neutral. Until something even better like nuclear fission becomes viable.
If only people weren’t fearmongering about nuclear 50 years ago we’d have clean energy today.
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, second best is now”
That saying works for trees. We didn’t make trees obsolete with better technology.
Reliable clean energy isn’t a solved issue today either. Until we have grid-level storage we need something that can provide a reliable base and had enough mass/momentum to handle grid fluctuations.
Stopping nuclear from being built is the problem.
We would have had a lot more clean energy than we do by now if we let the nuclear power plants that “would take too long to build!” be built back then, because they’d be up and running by now.
More letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Nuclear may have been good 10 years ago, but it isn’t really good anymore. This is like saying “if I had bought a PS2 in 2002 then I would have had fun playing Final Fantasy XI Online. Therefore, I should buy a PS2 and FFXI Online so I can have fun in 2024”. That ship has sailed
You can still play FFXI in 2024 officially on PC. Just don’t need the PS2.
and we can have 100% clean, renewable energy in 2024, we just don’t need the nuclear reactor
A nuclear power plant cannot destroy a city.
I guess destroy != Make unlivable
And that cannot happen. It’s a fear people have because they equate a nuclear power plant with a nuclear bomb. That is as wrong as considering the earth flat.
Funny how whataboutism makes your audience defensive.
Funny how being polite didn’t convince you so now you’re trying to sell that being mean is going to stop you. You were always useless.
Hey, I hear you, life is stressful and there’s a lot going on. It’s okay to be upset, I hope whatever you’re going through gets easier.
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Is there a particular reason you think everyone, here specifically, believes those things?
Edit: I absolutely share your passion about climate change, as a preface. Calling someone, who agrees with you or not, “useless” makes them dismiss your opinion. It just means we can’t engage in any meaningful discussion and others are less likely to take action.
I’m in Missouri so apparently I’m surrounded by silos
How many fingers do you have?
The problem isn’t that they exploded one time. The problem is that that one explosion is still happening and likely will be for quite a while.
On the other hand, modern rock exploding plant designs are so much better that it’s very unlikely to repeat itself, so there’s that.
I’m sure the other rock/liquid/gas burning plants have had no issues along their lifetime and had no hand in demonizing the “new” slowly exploding rock technology after extreme negligence let the one big one happen. /s
I’d take the band aid of nuclear in my backyard vs what we rely on now after learning all of the insider knowledge of someone who personally worked in energy generation that did all of this plus renewables almost their entire professional life.
Paraphrased but this is right.
And the people were taught to talk about the horrible nuclear accidents that killed a few but completely glance over the unimaginable millions perished in the name of oil, mustn’t even mention the mass extinction events we launched with oil.
We even spread exaggerated bullshit about radiation mutation (wtf? thats superhero comic books fiction!!) and cancer rates (only one really), ignoring how much overwhelmingly more of the both we get from fossil fuel products.
We are like prehistoric people going extinct bcs of the tales how generations ago someone burned down their house so fire bad. Well, actually not like that - we are taking with us a lot of species & entire ecosystems too.
It’s more like “Bob and Jim died in a fire a while ago, so everyone decided to put up with heaps of people dying to hypothermia and uncooked meat”
The local undertaker family tells the story about Bob and Jim once a week to the whole village (attendance is mandatory).
We’re all stories in the end.
“Ted Kennedy killed more people than Three Mile Island” - Bumper sticker.
That’s said, I facepalm at Fukushima. And desperately want more modern systems
You’re right to reject the logic behind that because it’s nonsense. Its not making sense to them because they still presume some kind of good faith when it come to these sorts of things.
The reason we haven’t built more nuclear power stations is because oil, gas and coal companies will make less money, if we build more nuclear power stations.
They have the means, the motive and they have a well recorded history of being that cartoonishly villainous. Nothing else makes sense.
It’s crazy that Mr. Burns from the Simpsons was in nuclear and not coal or oil. Probably a product of the propaganda at the time.
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl really did change things. Prior to those incidents there were plans to build over 50 more nuclear plants in place which got canceled as a result. Currently oil and gas industries will do all they can to keep nuclear from making a come back, but for a long time they didn’t have to do shit thanks to those catastrophes.
Don’t forget Fukushima bring an excellent reminder
They didn’t have to but they did anyway.
Burning down your house doesn’t poison people thousands of years later, so it’s not a perfect analogy.
Plus we have magic mirrors and magic fans that do the same thing as the magic rocks just way cheaper.
We’ve upgraded from burning our houses down to burning our atmosphere down which will absolutely poison humans for centuries to come. And since we now burn larger fires with black rocks, those release far more magic rock dust that poisons people than the magic rock water heaters do. Not to mention that fire has both killed more of us cave dwellers than magic rocks ever have (including the flying weaponry runes made from them) and have caused more ecological disasters, so fire is much worse.
Then we talk magic mirrors, they have evil rocks in them that get in our rivers and we don’t contain well. That aside, we show tradition to our ancestors by making much of them with slavery.
And the magic fans? The design is very human. They’d be a gift from the gods if only the spirit of the wind were always with us.
Summary: Magic rock still good, black rocks and black water make bad fire and hairless monkey make sick more.
Then we talk magic mirrors, they have evil rocks in them that get in our rivers and we don’t contain well. That aside, we show tradition to our ancestors by making much of them with slavery.
Sure, because mining uranium is total helaty and no problem at all.
https://genesenvironment.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41021-015-0019-3
One must be very careful when digging for magic hot rocks or else you expose the evil spirit vapors. Our ancestors knew that where there is magic, some evil lurks. As they did then, we do now when we accept a better evil in return for the magic we believe may do more good than before.
This is exactly, factually right, and eloquently put using the same meme terminology people here understand.
I love the wording in here
We had magic mirrors and magic fans for centuries tho.
Yet we decided to release way more poison and even way more radiation by mining and burning fossil fuels. We just poison larger areas than any nuclear disasters. And with fossil fuels people actually get cancer, and with toxic byproducts, mutations and birth defects.
People in polluted areas die sooner. Except around nuclear disasters sights - the air gets cleaner once all the people are thrown out.
We had magic mirrors and magic fans for centuries tho.
We’ve had solar and wind electricity generation for centuries?
Eccentricity generators were invented before mass oil or coal use (1830s by Faraday).
We’ve had windmills, hydro, and even animal/human powered devices that could result in turning cranks for the generator to produce electricity - all for centuries at even that point. I would have to look up about when we first used solar to boil water, but I’m guessing there about.
Biomass and windmills perhaps
Well, you see, the “Anti Magic Rock” Lobby has immense amount of power because of the money of the still lucrative “burning stuff and pollute everything” business.
Nuclear isn’t in competition with fossil fuels, it’s in competition with renewables. Renewables are better than nuclear by pretty much every conceivable metric. So fuck nuclear power, it’s a waste of money and time.
Fact: that is a fake statement.
Nuclear is not renewables competition.
Nuclear provides a base line energy production.
Both renewables and fossils produce a variable production line.
So within a rational production scheme the choice is nuclear+renewables or fossils+renewables. As renewables by themselves cannot work. Because there is months over the year when it’s not sunny, not rainy and not windy enough, what do we do for those months? We close humanity during those months because some political dogma says so?
Are you sure renewables don’t require more extracted resources and more land usage per quantity of energy produced?
yes
It’s the “Burning other magic rocks” party.
That, and the green parties (at least in EU).
I feel like people are interpreting your comment with an American context. As a fellow European I agree, NGOs like Greenpeace are also to blame, and I don’t think those are financed by fossil fuel lobbies.
I hadn’t made that connection. Thank you
Yeah, oil oiled the “green” anti-nuclear protests.
You can tell that’s how it was because the cops didn’t beat them as much (or in some big cases at all) as they do even the most insignificant anti-oil protesters.
The “green” parties 💵💵
