Good. We keep shutting down nuclear plants and replacing them with gas. We need to stop shutting them down and go further, build more.
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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I’m not anti-nuclear, but from my understanding it’s not necessarily cost or resource-effective to build new plants, since other renewables have advanced so rapidly
If you just want the cheapest grid possible (regardless of emissions), renewables paired with gas is the cheapest. There are some exceptions to this, places like cloudy Seattle don't make for good solar farms, which drives up the effective cost of solar significantly.
If you are shooting for a carbon-free grid, nuclear is notably cheaper than renewables paired with grid-scale storage. Notably, much of the nuclear cost is bureaucracy that keeps the plants in limbo for decades and are quite good at making this carbon-free power source unnaturally expensive. This bureaucracy can be brought to a reasonable level if there is political will.
Nuclear power plants also don't have standardized parts afaik, driving up costs.
They do and they don't. They don't because they're machines the size of buildings, but they do because most of their construction is just standard plumbing. Except the reactor itself, of course.
It's pretty similar to shipbuilding. You can have a bunch of mass-produced components, even enormous components like shipping container engines, but the hull and superstructure still get made from scratch each time. And not just because of their size, but because each ship is going to be slightly custom, because it needs to fit a certain size envelope, or needs to deal with certain cargos or environmental conditions.
Similarly, a reactor needs to be built to fit the site, in terms of plain old footprint, but also for geology, water access (if using a river for cooling), and to be protected from storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other local disasters.
That's simply an issue of not building enough of them.
Yes that's my point
After the boondoggle that Vogtle became I don't think building new ones is a good idea. That's a lot of money tied up and not making energy.
I do think refurbishing and reactivating old plants when possible makes sense. The timeline is a lot shorter, and it's a lot cheaper than renewables. For example, the plant in the article can produce 2.5GW, and the same price would only get about 500MW of solar.
They're expensive
Expensive to build much cheaper to run. Doesn't take much time at all at the scale of the electrical grid for it to pay itself off.
If this were true, the levelized cost of nuclear energy would be much lower than it is:
Nuclear is expensive to build and expensive to run.
The heck why's it's more expensive now? I hadn't looked in years wtf
In France, they are expensive to build and expensive to maintain... And you need to buy stuff from Russia to keep them running....
Why not (instead of gas and nuclear) building more renewables, which are cheeper? Wind and solar should be the priority, nuclear should be the alternative when wind and solar does not work.
This whole thing feels like a giant money pocketing scam. They shouldn't have shut it down in the first place.
People are still afraid of nuclear power. It doesn't matter that is a reliable green energy source that will last longer than we'll ever need it to. It doesn't matter that often the alternative is fossil fuels. Politicians don't even want to touch this N word.
Radiation is scary, so plants are getting shut down all the time. Huge plants that were 60 year investments, that took 10 years to build, and are currently working great are being shut down right and left, guaranteeing that they'll never make back the massive investment.
Shortsightedness is a huge (and expensive) problem as well as perhaps the most consistent aspect of human civilization.
In other words, this is an example of Hanlon's Razor, it's not a scam, it's just pure, organic, all-natural stupidity.
I think nuclear energy is the way. I just don't think human civilization is stable or responsible enough to house the waste for the 500k-1 million years for the half life to happen.
That said, it's still the best way, even with waste being considered.
I hope our decendants loooove cleaning up messes.
