I am interested in hearing your opinions about nuclear power, what you know, if you have any fears, or ideas? Do you know if your country has any nuclear power generation?
I like it and want to see it spread. I think if you tally up all the deaths indirectly caused by air pollution from fossil fuels they’ll exceed the people killed in nuclear accidents by orders of magnitude.
By a very very large magnitude. And when you factor in stuff like mining deaths and industrial accidents, nuclear kills less people than wind (per kwh) but solar is slightly better than nuclear.
I think it’s good to have, I don’t think we should push it above renewables though, I think it should be in addition to renewables, to fill in the gaps. Batteries and pumped hydro would be better but they have drawbacks of course.
I doubt it’s going to happen here in Australia though. There is way too much public pushback. Our right wing party went into the last election trying to push nuclear as the solution to climate change and that election was a disaster for them.
Still about 70% coal and gas, big oof. Nuclear would help a lot, especially because Australia has one of the largest uranium reserves.
I would gladly live next door to a nuclear plant
It’s safer than living next to a coal fired power plant!
It’s better, smaller, and even more eco-friendly than what is generally considered “green”.
But it takes a very long time to get up and running, and the current world is all about the short term.
One downside I see is that bad cunts can bomb them. Like Israel bombing the Russia-operated one in Iran.
I am defintely not against nuclear power and I am also not afraid of any nuclear disasters seeing how safe nuclear reactors actually are. I still prefer solar and wind power over nuclear tho because we still deal with nuclear waste and not very well imo. I would also love having fusion reactors or helium-3 fission reactors which also combats the nuclear waste problem.
To be fair, there’s waste issues with end of life for solar and wind too. No matter what solution we go with, we need a way to deal with the waste (recycling is probably the best option, but storage for nuclear waste doesn’t actually take up that much space. For solar/wind, it’s going to have to be recycling or a huge ass landfill).
I am extremely pro. Hear me out. For instance in Scandinavia, we have some of the largest uranium deposits in the world. Yet we import most of our fissile material from Australia. By boat.
The Scandes (mountain range) happens to be one of the best places to store spent fissile material on the planet.
We also have a highly educated workforce, and some of the best universities and colleges in the world.
We also have regional depopulation in the areas where this would be relevant, and suffer from brain drain, because there is more money to be made abroad for the whole range of academic disciplines, so the smartest people, and a fair chunk of the lesser smart people, move abroad. Because lack of opportunities and money.
Furthermore we are addicted to not only fossil fuels like carbon and gas, we (Europe) import most of our energy from Russia (famously). And we are making a lot of geopolitical concessions for the privilege (Nordstream springs to mind).
My proposition is that we expand nuclear power in the nordics, massively. We mine our own uranium deposits, store the spent fuel in our own mountains (think Moria, Nords would make for great LOTR dwarves), create a massive surplus of energy, then sell it off to the rest of Europe, creating basically an energy export hegemony. The energy basket of Europe.
We’d be fucking kings.
Then we’d create a Nordic Union, and get nukes, but that’s a different story.
(Just as a fun fact, Sweden had one of the worlds most advanced nuke programs after WW2. They got talked out of it bc USA)
Reprocessing spent fuel is also a massive opportunity. But yea I am 100% in agreement with you.
Right? Let’s build world class long term storage, it’s like a parking garage, a scam old as time, just rent out space to whoever can’t or don’t wanna deal with their shit and cash that check monthly. And we can enrich and be lords, of course there are some political obstacles to say the least but what are we if we don’t dare to dream
Maybe I’m thinking about the whole thing in a SimCity 2000 kind of way but that’s just how I was brought up.
The cool thing about wind and solar power generation is that you could build one in your backyard.
For nuclear power that is seriously frowned upon.
Give it time. Maybe one day we’ll be able to buy a kit. (For internet purposes, this is a j o k e)
It’s great and we should have more of it.
Unjustified fears of it blowing up and destroying the world are ridiculous and overblown, especially given modern advances in reactor design and safety. Nuclear waste isn’t really an issue, so much as it is an issue of bad policy based on fear mongering about waste being stolen and turned into nuclear weapons/dirty bombs. Which has never happened… it’s utterly stupid that due to these stupid fears we don’t re-process fuel, which would reduce it’s volume by 80%.
There are 431 reactors, and 360 of them are based on 1960s technology, designed and built mostly in the 1970s. They are 50+ years old. Thanks to Chernobyl, reactors are basically stuck in time. Esp when you realize that non-nuclear plants only last about 30 years before they are replaced
There are only 4 Gen 3 reactors in service, and 2 gen 4. Why we don’t have 200+ gen 3/4 reactors is… insane. We just keep re-fueling the less safe Gen 2 reactors.
But this is generally just a problem with all our infrastructure in the developed world in general… we don’t renew or upgrade it… we just keep patching it and then we wonder why everything is so shitty and inefficient… because we refuse to actually upgrade things in a real way
How is the waste not an issue? I have never heard the argument of it being stolen to be honest. Here in germany the problem with the waste is, that there is no good place to put it (though this is partly a political problem)
in the USA they won’t re-process fuel because of fears it will be stolen and turned into weapons. so we have 5x the waste volume than other countries where fuel is re-processed.
also we won’t use breeder reactors because of this, which are more efficient and produce way less waste than normal reactors.
yes, it’s all political problems. people are ignorant and angry and fearful and won’t let nuclear power problems be resolved because they don’t understand solutions exist and if you try to educate them they refuse to learn because they want to cling to their fears and emotions about it. a lot of political problems are like this. we have active solutions for many social problems, but people refuse to allow them to be implemented because of fear and delusional belief.
Only ~3% of nuclear waste is really dangerous, that’s the spent fuel rods. The majority of “nuclear waste” is stuff that was in proximity and contains intermediate to low levels of radioactivity. It’s obviously not great to injest or spend all your time around, but it can be safely stored almost anywhere as it’s mostly only emitting alpha and beta particles.
So what about the dangerous stuff like fuel rods? Well, if you took all the dangerous waste nuclear power ever created and piled it in one place, it would cover a football field and be stacked 3 meters high. That sounds like a lot, but remember, that’s is ALL the dangerous waste nuclear power has EVER produced. Compare that to literally any other form of energy production, including solar and wind, and the footprint from nuclear is laughably, almost unimaginably, small.
I think you have no clue how dangerous that waste is. There is literally no way to store it in a volume like you described because of all the heat it generates. If it gets distributed for some reason, it could contaminate the entire planet.
Also, other nuclear waste is not not dangerous. You have to store it in a way that it doesn’t pollute water, for example. That is a much harder problem than you might think. Here is an interesting read for you:
I don’t think OP was saying we should store it that way, just that it’s not as physically as big a problem as people imagine. It’s a question of scale.
We could just leave them all in the storage containers that the plants use and put them in one place and the overall facility wouldn’t be that big.
As for groundwater contamination, you are right. No leaks allowed. This is a consideration for any waste management really (superfund sites, anyone?). Transportation is another issue for consideration. If you move the waste on a roadway, and there’s an accident, you’re going to have to clean up the mess (assuming there is any. We have really amazing containers for shipping) or at least check for any issues, which means every fire department with a major roadway needs to both be trained and have the equipment to handle a radioactive car crash.
Because the amount of waste we’ve created is really quite small. Per the US DoE:
U.S. commercial reactors have generated about 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel since the 1950s. If all of it were able to be stacked together, it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards (or meters).
There are ways we can repurpose or reuse spent nuclear fuel. I don’t know a lot about this so I won’t get into it, but even if we chose to do nothing with it and just bury it, we know enough about geology that we could stick it into some bedrock that will be stable for the next 500 million years.
But long term storage also isn’t easy. Maybe it’s less of a problem in the US (you’ve got a lot more free space where no one lives) but it has to be made sure that it does not contaminate the surroundings, even in thousands of years and more. Another (as of yet unsolved) problem is far more human. How do we mark those places, if at all. See this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
Just hollow out a mountain, like the US did with Yucca mountain, plenty of storage (if you’re politicians let it be used for its purpose) that is pretty easy to secure for centuries (and after that probably pretty easy as well). Assuming you close it up well when full, even future historians probably will have an idea that it’s dangerous by the level of difficulty to just get into it.
Not trying to discount the issue, just point out that there generally are solutions to the issues around nuclear waste, just that politicians have mucked it up quite a bit in the past (especially in the US).
The idea in germany are old mines, we already have some “temporary” solution (an old saltmine) but there are some problems with it. Understandably there is a lot of nimbyism around the permanent storage, which makes finding a good spot a lot harder
Just hollow out a mountain, like the US did with Yucca mountain
Until Harry Reid does everything in his power to shut it down like an asshole
eh, i’m 50% talking out of my ass here, but the waste is actually not a problem. if we wanted to, we could use it again to extract even more energy out of it … problem is that that’s currently not economical.
“using it again” would require special reactor designs that can stimulate the material to do extra-decay. which causes the extra cost.
That is more like 99% out of your ass.
It takes 10 years minimum from design to build out for a nuclear project, so that lines up pretty well with the end of the cold war once the US didn’t need more nuclear material.
There is no point in using a technology that is only as profitable as it is due to subsidies and that generates tons of dangerous waste that we have no proper storage strategy for, when we could just use regenerative energy sources with basically no side effects and build a much more resilient power grid in the process.
Which has never happened
which, as we all know, implies that it will never happen …
actually, after reading through your whole comment, it has a few issues:
Unjustified fears of it blowing up and destroying the world are ridiculous and overblown, especially given modern advances in reactor design and safety.
Yes, you’re right, nuclear power plants are safe as long as nobody in engineering royally fucks up. But, as we all know, engineers never fuck up and forget an important detail … (/s)
But this is generally just a problem with all our infrastructure in the developed world in general… we don’t renew or upgrade it… we just keep patching it and then we wonder why everything is so shitty and inefficient… because we refuse to actually upgrade things in a real way
This sounds like a popular thing to me … people think that replacing old things will make them better / more efficient. When that is simply not true. Banks, for example, still use programming language from the 1960s. Why? because actually it turns out that that stuff just works. Meanwhile newer languages each introduce their own new kind of problem. The same phenomenon happens in many cases. I was told that airplanes do the same, using flight control software from 20th century … for the same reasons. “newer” does not imply better.
In fairness, it’s not one engineer. It’s literally hundreds of them. Thousands, probably. And not all of them working for a common goal. The power of the NRC is in its desire to slow down and double check (which is why the drump administration’s push for deregulation is scary for nuclear).
I’m not saying mistakes don’t happen, but the Russians knew Chernobyl was flawed they just didn’t care.
I live in Taiwan and we are actively shutting down our nuclear facilities. Now the majority of our electricity is from fossil fuels.
I much rather work towards clean energy but at the same time only use nuclear power.
It would have been a good transition source of power away from fossil fuels 15 years ago with further development while we build out a renewable infrastructure. Now, best I can see it as backup for some areas of the country.
My only complaint to add to the debate is that too much of the waste discussion assumed it’s burnt fuel and not just irradiated junk shoved in barrels. At least that is what a former nuclear engineer complained to me about.
The second I guess in the US is the weird public private deals that permiate the industry. Like who’s the inspector? Oh that’s a private company? Whos responsible for the waste? The government? Where is it stored? Oh your not sure? It was SUPPOSED to here but some of its there and some of it supposed to recycled but some supposedly can’t be. Who funded this? Who’s profiting?
I got some very confusing answers asking people in the industry about it, and they seemed to agree it was confusing.
It is confusing! I’ll add my understanding and it will probably be different than other things you’ve heard, but I’ll add it anyway.
The NRC (for the US) is the regulator. They have ultimate authority to inspect all nuclear power plants. Sometimes the state does as well, depends on the state’s agreement with the NRC. But ultimately it’s the NRC. Every power plant has an NRC inspector whose job it is to look for infractions and make sure the plant is doing all the things. They obviously can’t be everywhere at once, so there’s a bunch of other stuff the plants have to do to prove they are following all the rules. There is currently a huge regulatory burden on nuclear power plant operators and owners. Good. It should be that way for small modular reactors but it remains to be seen of they’ll be able to get away with less safe practices (my bet is yes, at least under the current administration).
Waste is complicated. The US government made a deal a long time ago with the utilities building the plants that they’d provide a place for waste storage, and they haven’t, so they’ve been sued. They’ll just keep getting sued and have to pay the utilities back (the utilities pay for the waste location by paying the gov… It’s weird). There are some attempts being made to have a private company (or companies) take over storing the waste. It’s complicated, and still requires us to transport the waste, which is also complicated. That being said, the DOE has been doing transuranic waste transportation for ages (irradiated junk in barrels) It’s called WIPP and they move all the contaminated crap to a salt mine in NV. It’s not easy, but it can be done.
As for loosing any of the waste… Yeah, if you lose the actual waste that’s very bad and NRC very mad at you. But the irradiated junk? Eh, the government loses shit all the time. Irradiated junk isn’t great, but it’s probably not killing you. Probably not.
And as for who’s profiting? Who knows? It’s like George Carlin said. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.
It was worth it 30-50 years ago. But we wasted too much time fucking around.
At this point any money spent is better spent on wind and solar.
I’ve seen this mentality too many times. The fact is China is actively building many nuclear power plants. The idea that it’s “too late” is ridiculous. There is growing demand for nuclear power. You can have solar, wind, AND nuclear.
With unlimited resources, yes it would make sense to keep building nuclear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
But wind and solar have outpaced nuclear. You can get way more power way quicker with wind and solar than you can nuclear.
And what we need right now is maximum speed. We don’t have time. This transition should be happening overnight, but we’re dragging our feet.
Part of the cost of nuclear is all the lawsuits. Someone else talked about China doing a lot with nuclear and part of that is that they don’t have to deal with the lawsuits. So so so many lawsuits.
I do love this chart though. It’s really representative of why we need to invest in new technology even when it seems stupid expensive at first.
The 2 points I do want to bring up are, one, as someone else mentioned, battery storage. It’s sort of the unsolved puzzle of renewables at this point. I’m certain we will figure it out and be able to produce something at scale and renewables at that point will be the only even sort of ethical option (assuming the batteries aren’t made of minerals mined exclusively by slave labor or something, then I guess the debate will still rage on).
And second, SMRs are still not actually a thing yet. The cost of nuclear could drop (probably will drop drastically) when mini nuclear power plants are being produced rapidly and shipped around to various locations. Kinda like how building a modular home is much cheaper than a fully custom one with a bespoke design. Assuming they find a way to make all that happen before widespread large load batteries, I wouldn’t consider it as clear cut.
In reality it makes sense to keep building nuclear, the resources required to build nuclear are mostly different than building solar and wind, so you can definitely do both to increase carbon free energy rapidly. I agree we need to rapidly scale solar and wind, but we also need to be advancing nuclear power technology.
Also solar and wind need batteries because of their variable generation, again which are different materials/knowledge than nuclear mostly.
They may take different materials, but until we escape capitalism the only thing that will matter is the literal monetary cost.
In a perfect world, we would be doing both side by side because of the different materials needed. But in the current world the opportunity cost exists due to monetary limits.
Like you keep saying “we”. China is currently doing what you mention “in a perfect world”. Why can’t we do the same? Why is it that Illinois stopped at around exactly 50%? They ACTIVELY constructing these.
We as in humanity. The majority of nations are capitalist nations, and all nations use currency, which means opportunity cost.
Every state and power utility that is considering what to allocate their money on is going to choose the bare minimum it takes to keep the lights on. That means going the cheapest, not doing the most.
China may have a lower opportunity cost due to the tighter control over the economy, but they’re still paying it. China is not in the perfect world situation either. They’re just sacrificing the opportunity cost.
I’m confused, do the Chinese not count as a part of humanity? The entire world is losing to China when it comes to nuclear power increases.
I’d rather solar at this point.
I’m a mechanical engineer working on the operations side of a large power plant. I’ve worked in a few different types of plants but ultimately landed in a big Co-Generation plant. Knowing what I do, the actual arguments against nuclear are pretty flimsy. It’s just better in almost every way especially compared to solid fuel. I strongly believe that there is a place for every method of generating we currently use (excluding coal for the most part). Main generating electricity can and should come from nuclear on the most wide scale with hydro, solar and wind being a large chunk where geographically most viable. While nat gas and liquid fuel should mostly be used in peaker plants and large scale essential buildings like hospitals. I hope to work in a nuclear plant eventually and have positioned myself to be qualified to do so.
Awesome, I wish you the best, we need more people to get involved in nuclear power, myself included. Opponents point to older designs and point at the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island and think that can happen at any moment, which they can’t. I think we have an obligation to dispel that fear because the designs we build today are better.
5 to 15 years ago, I would have agreed with you. Now, I think we need some small number of breeder reactors to supply us with medical isotopes, etc., but I don’t see nuclear as financially viable anymore, whatever the reason. Hydro, solar, wind, and battery can cover our needs at this point, or once we phase out our existing non-renewable and nuclear plants. And every year tips things further in favor of non-nuclear, simply because of the construction times. We also have some very cheap, long-lived battery technologies coming online, which will help with load balancing.
I’d still rather have more nuclear plants than using prime cropland for ethanol fuel production.
They aren’t nearly as unsafe as people think they are and I think they are completely fine.
BUT it still doesn’t make sense to build them, because renewables (especially solar) is so much cheaper, so we should focus all our energy on expanding that instead of nuclear.
Nuclear is good for many reasons except it’s not good for anyone when there still is geopolitical and military instability. I don’t know much other than what can be read on Wikipedia and other popular information sources.
