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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Nuclear energy is expensive to generate compared to its green competitors. Therefore, it’s a waste of time and money to focus on it at a time when renewable energy is currently cheaper to produce, knowing that the gap between nuclear and energy is projected to widen even more.
I’d rather solar at this point.
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’s good and has few downsides, but I feel like we kind of missed the boat and solar is the move now.
There is still massive energy demand, “missed the boat” is kind of nonsensical.
It’s not a well-reasoned feeling, I’m sure if I saw the numbers on the energy production vs cost etc., I could form a better opinion on it. As-is I will support both nuclear and solar, since they’re both clearly better than fossil fuels.
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.
I think we are making big mistakes ditching it.
Renewables have two problems that need to be complemented by other type of energy source.
1.- they take a lot of land. As energy demand increases the amount of land taken is going to reach a limit. Then what?
2.- Most renewables have low momentum. Mostly only hydro have great momentum. This is critical for net safety. My country recently falled into a total blackout among other things because our energy composition (high on renewables) had low momentum and couldn’t handle some inestabilities.
For a complementary energy source we have 2 options, burning coal/gas or nuclear. Out of two options I prefer nuclear Sadly every country that ditched nuclear because “renewables are the future” ended upping up their gas/coal consumption for energy production. Most famous example being Germany.
I do think a mix of renewables and nuclear is the future we need to achieve.
Sadly most western societies only look on the short term. And a good national nuclear plant is a long term investment, most governments won’t look so far after the next election, so here we are.
