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Edit: Changed introductory wording to be less belligerent. I am sorry if I have caused a significant level of offense.
~~Just wait for the nuclear shills to flood in and claim that nuclear fission is a sustainable and necessary form of power generation.~~ Some people claim that nuclear fission is a sustainable and necessary form of power generation. It is not. Uranium extraction devastates entire landscapes, the construction of nuclear power plants is too expensive (even for SMRs, as the article explains), ergo electricity prices will climb, it is a hugely wasteful use of so many tonnes of concrete (concrete manufacturing is heavy on the environment too), it creates waste that will still haunt us for hundreds of thousands of years (finding geological structures that are guaranteed to be stable that long is difficult), and relative to the initial construction and set-up effort, they don't provide that much energy. We already have methods that can provide us plenty enough electricity that are entirely sustainable by leveraging large-scale atmospheric aerodynamics as well as the largest nuclear fusion reactor at our disposal (the sun). There's simply no need to go nuclear.
I hate that the conversation is happening on these terms. I hate that we have a bunch of opinionated online "teams" on this issue.
Hey, you know what we need? All of it. Any sort of energy generation that lowers atmospheric emissions in any way we do need. The concept of "nuclear shills" shouldn't exist, the concept of "solar shills" or "hydrogen shills" or "fossil fuel shills" shouldn't exist. The entire conversation is a PR battle by energy corps to get people to buy into marketing so they can get governments to back popular choices so they can get expensive contracts for large infrastructure work.
I hate that we have online keyboard warriors overrepresenting the challenges of one of the contributors to lowering emissions while underrepresenting the challenges of others. Hey, do you think nighttime generation and storage is an issue? Maybe installation costs for domestic solar generation, the state of the grid or the uneven distribution of solar power yields on different territories? Because I do.
And I do think cost and build times for nuclear generators are a problem (which makes it confusing that some countries are dismantling plants that seem to be working safely and are within their expected lifespan, but I digress).
And I do think the impact of hydroelectric power in nearby areas is a problem.
And I do think the open questions for geothermal are a problem.
And I do think the issues with cost, storage and dirty generation of hydrogen are a problem.
And I do think we should be working on all of that. At once. This isn't kids arguing about which game console is better on the backyard, this is a massive existential issue, and would be even if we weren't dealing with a climate change ticking bomb. This report? It's bad news. Any report that tells us any of the ideas we have for weaning off fossil fuels is not working as well as we expected is bad news. Can we all get with that program?
The problem is that "both" isn't a valid option unless a country has unlimited finances.
Otherwise you have to decide on what's the most feasible option and then renewables win big time
I sometimes feel as if the current push for atomic is from the fossil-lobby as they are aware that it either works and they get 10-20 more years to sell oil until the reactors are built - and even if it doesn't work out it still will slow down rollout of renewables
If you have 100 billion to spend on energy producing you have to choose if you want to go all-in with one source or split it up which would move the end of fossil fuels Back further
Not to mention having to buy the radioactive materials from dictatorships and having problems to cool down the reactors with rising temperatures and rivers running dry
I just don't see how atomic isn't a huge gamble that can backfire hard (and I'm not even talking about catastrophic events like Fukushima)
You keep doing the thing. The thing sucks. Please stop.
For one, no, that's not how that works. Money is already being spent in energy generation, mostly towards oil and gas. This isn't your weekly takeout budget.
It's also not a race towards infinite energy where you dump money to make the infinite energy bar go up. Energy generation will continue to be costly and have problems, regardless of the mix of options chosen. There is simply no single silver bullet. Which is, presumably why we already don't go "all-in" on one energy source, which is just about the dumbest possible plan. Energy diversification is absolutely part of this, regardless of where the majority of the output is coming from.
So please stop it. Genuinely stop it. This isn't a zero sum game, it's about finding the mix of energy sources that gets you less killed in the next century or so. Not finding a single source, not backing a single winning horse, not having your stupid team you support for either dumb Internet reasons or disingenuous trolling reasons win.
ricdeh 4 points 58 minutes ago* (last edited 56 minutes ago)
Just wait for the nuclear shills to flood in and claim that nuclear fission is a sustainable and necessary form of power generation. No, it is not. Uranium extraction devastates entire landscapes, the construction of nuclear power plants is too expensive (even for SMRs, as the article explains), ergo electricity prices will climb, it is a hugely wasteful use of so many tonnes of concrete (concrete manufacturing is heavy on the environment too), it creates waste that will still haunt us for hundreds of thousands of years (finding geological structures that are guaranteed to be stable that long is difficult), and relative to the initial construction and set-up effort, they don't provide that much energy. We already have methods that can provide us plenty enough electricity that are entirely sustainable by leveraging large-scale atmospheric aerodynamics as well as the largest nuclear fusion reactor at our disposal (the sun). There's simply no need to go nuclear.
Brought to you by fossil fuel propaganda filtered through renewable resource advocates who would also lose out to nuclear energy.
Does anyone know about the technology that nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers use? Why are they able to operate but we can't use the same technology on land?
I was a nuclear operator in the Navy. Here are the actual reasons:
- The designs are classified US military assets
- They are not refuleable
- They only come in 2 “sizes”: aircraft carrier and submarine
- They are not scaleable. You can just make a reactor 2x as big
- They require as much down time as up time
- They are outdated
- The military won’t let you interrupt their supply chain to make civilian reactors
- New designs over promise and underdeliver
- They are optimized for erratic operations (combat) not steady state (normal power loads)
- They are engineered assuming they have infinite sea water available for everything
There’s more but that’s just off the top of my head
Because if the military wants something, budgets are big. And they do not need to make money.
Military expenses, the only socialism acceptable to Americans.
Gotta love how the post office is legally required to show they can turn a profit, but the military has a history of building literal burn pits that essentially burn US tax dollars by lighting equipment on fire and giving soldiers cancer.
Because military engineers overengineer these things from the most expensive materials available, and they also perform frequent maintenance on them, which is also expensive.
To add to this: A certain type of Soviet submarine used a lead-bismuth alloy as coolant for their reactor. The coolant solidifies at ambient temperature so it had to be heated indefinitely by some way or another or else it solidified and trashed the reactor. I don't think any of them exist anymore since Russia wasn't able to afford sustaining the giant navy after the Soviet collapse.
Just goes to show how insane nuclear submarine engineering is, or was at some point.
Why are they able to operate but we can’t use the same technology on land?
Military budgets. You can use the tech, but no civilian can afford it.
They used pressurised water reactors with enriched uranium. Dunno how the costs run but there is no strategic alternative anyway. They also wouldn't want such highly enriched uranium to be commonplace.
I'm pretty sure they essentially are "one time use" only.
Extremely simplified:
They run for 20-30 years without refueling, which means the reactors/system could be built more compact, a higher level of safety and require less maintenance / monitoring / fine-tuning.
All those parameters are connected in an equation which means if you want higher safety you have to make another parameter "worse". By making the system "one time use" you set the "refuelability" and "repairability" parameters to the lowest and can therefore up the other parameters.
Also, military requirements are very different from civilian.
This was pretty much obvious for everyone from the beginning, except if you're a fanboy of this tech.
They are still going for big building size reactors that have site specific details even if the core is built in a "factory". This still doesn't scale well.
I wonder if it can be economical to go smaller still and ship a reactor and power generation (TRG maybe or a small turbine) that then doesn't require much other than connecting wiring and plumbing and its encased in at least one security layer covered in sensors if something goes wrong its all contained. Then its just a single lorry with a box you wire in. That has a chance of being scalable and easy to deploy and I can't help but think there is a market for ~0.5-10 KW reactors if they can get the lowest end down to about $20,000, it would compete OK with solar and wind price wise.
I suspect no one has bothered because the regulatory overhead means it has to be big enough to be worth it and like Wind power scales enormously with the size of the plant. But what I want is a tiny reactor in my basement, add a few batteries for dealing with the duck curve and you have something that will sit there producing power for 25 years and a contract for it be repaired and ultimately collected at end of life.
You can sort of do this today using the Tritium glow sticks and solar cells but it doesn't last long enough and the price is not competitive. Going more directly to the band gap in a silicon or something else semi-conductive and a long lived nuclear material could maybe get a little closer price wise.
You want people to have their own private nuclear reactor in their basement?
Nukeheads are insane
That's some real 1950s futurism.
Ford proposed a car with a nuclear reactor.
Nuclear fanboys are strange! The won't let it go.
Because it’s really cool tech and unlike burning coal, oil and gas it’s CO2 neutral. And alternatives like fusion reactors are still decades away, at least, and we can’t build renewables fast enough either.
In my opinion shutting down all nuclear powerplants was the stupidest thing the government here in Germany has ever done, especially since coal is still being subsidized and our planet isn’t getting any cooler.
Why can't we switch to thorium and molten salt instead? Much cleaner, much safer, same idea.
Because it is actually not that simple, especially on the "cleaner" and "safer" parts.
The technology doesn't exist in a commercially viable form. That's why.
It's not because of smr, it's just that all large projects have this level of corruption and grift.
all large projects have this level of corruption and grift
Skill issue. I can't even blame capitalism, since the french manage to get almost 90% of their power from nuclear.
China has 53 GW installed, 25 GW under construction, and another 47 GW planned. Generally they're pretty clear-eyed when it comes to major projects like this, so I think we can infer the availability of cheap hydro and solar doesn't favor doing more than ~15% nuclear since they're only planning to increase it by 150% over the next couple decades.
Maybe that will change when they set up long term storage/reprocessing.
IIRC the French reactors are all nearing their end of service life and'll be decommissioned soon.
Lemy has such a hard on against nuclear. I'm seeing reports by antinuclear think tank grifters shoved in my face almost daily...