There are aspects of many political parties I agree with, but to me, being against Nuclear Power is the largest short sighted items this and a couple of other parties are/were against.
If many countries took the same road as France, the world would be in a much better place. Imagine the energy advances that could have happened if nuclear was supported for the past 50 years.
Or renewables. I remind you that nuclear power is completely economically unviable today because it is the single most expensive way to generate power. Even with Trump rolling back safety regulations, it's still too expensive when solar panels are 10 cents per watt, nuclear is 50, and the amount of backup storage to offset the unreliability does not bridge that gap.
Also France is around 7c (euro) per kwh from nuclear generation. If the whole west was all in on nuclear for last 50 years it would have resulted in lower per kwh costs.
What would solar's cost per kWh be? GP means the cost of the asset per peak generation power. 0.1/W seems about right, to an order of magnitude at least.
and i remind you that this framing is completely misleading outside the world of simulations and calculations.
Nuclear doesn't need to be the only source of electricity generation. In fact, it can be the base on top of which a serious country expands electricity generation with renewable energy.
I will also remind you that there is not a single industrialised economy anywhere on earth that has successfully supplied new electricity growth with only renewable energy. Not one.
> I will also remind you that there is not a single industrialised economy anywhere on earth that has successfully supplied new electricity growth with only renewable energy. Not one.
Nuclear fans across the internet seems to have adopted this talking point recently and none of them have noticed it doesn't make any sense.
Gas is dispatchable, nuclear is not. It’s enormously expensive, and that expense is locked in whether you need the power or not.
We’re already in a situation where we have more power than we need during certain hours of the day in some states/countries, and that’s not even counting the massive, accelerating buildout that will happen between now and the years before new nuclear is built… even it was started today.
I'm happy they're doing this, and it's good and admirable to see people be able to change their minds on something they once believed so strongly, but this should have happened 30 years ago.
>People only "change their mind" when it becomes an existential crisis.
If only. There's people and parties (not in the UK) who would rather see the rest of the country suffer than admit they were wrong, so they feel compelled to die on that hill and take everyone with them, because defending their principle is more important.
We're talking about Germany shuttering their nuclear power plants despite USA warning them repeatedly that Russia was going to weaponize the Nord Stream gas dependence against them. Which is ultimately exactly what happened.
if the germans want to shoot themselves in the foot they are allowed to do this, yes. what is the point of your comment? it's not even remotely relevant.
I was trying to point out that societies make and are free to make decisions that others don't like or that aren't great for them by some metric - and that there is nothing wrong with that. Why is that not relevant when it comes to energy?
so your point is that it's fine that germany ceeded energy independence and gave power to russia, because they're a country and countries have the 'right' to make bad decisions?
we have the right to criticise countries too right?
If Germans don't want energy independence - you can criticize that but that's how nation states work or is there some UN Charter violation in there, for example?
im still so confused what your point is. it's like talking about the consequences of someone's alcoholism, and someone chiming in "well they have a right to die of the booze if they want" like...ok???
So any nation state needs to be energy independent? Is that your point? Or have cheap energy and energy independence? If people want low growth, expensive energy etc., why is that like alcoholism? What is intrinsically bad there? Not like life expectancy in Germany is low, for example.
Nuclear power replaced coal in Germany, not gas. A big dependence exists because people heat their homes with gas and lots of industry needs gas, nuclear doesn’t help with either.
It's a bit more complex, I think. When gas imports started from the USSR, nuclear power plants were still being built in Germany, for example. There were gas imports for a long time.
That is not really the case. Germany certainly wanted cheap gas, but there was also the theory that integrating Russia economically will prevent conflicts. While ultimately a wrong decision, it was not entirely stupid.
But regarding gas, one has to understand that a tiny fraction (15%) of gas is used for electricity and most for heating. So nuclear power is completely irrelevant here.
I also would like people realize that many nuclear plants in Europe and elsewhere still depend on fuel from Russia. So energy dependence is a bit more complex.
Unlike fossil fuel power plants, NPPs don't depend on a steady supply of a high volume of costly consumables just to keep running. Reactor fuel loads last months to years, naturally buffering any price shocks or supply chain issues. And you can maintain an "energy security" stockpile of nuclear fuel that would add you even more years of runaway.
To have your nuclear power disrupted, you have to face an adversary that's both capable and willing to hit targets on your soil, and on top of that, is willing to target NPP infrastructure specifically.
A random rogue state lobbing mid-range drones over a strait wouldn't cut it. Neither would a war halfway around the world.
Which means new nuclear is about the worst thing we can spend our limited resources on since it won't be coming online until the 2040s, and then at a ruinosuly expensive price.
Meanwhile renewables and storage are reshaping our global energy system due to being the cheapest globally scalable energy source in human history.
We also need to keep in mind nuclear supply chains. After 21 sanction packages the EU still haven't sanctioned Russia's nuclear industry.
We're simply too deeply entangled across the entire supply chain: nuclear fuel, enrichment, reprocessing, technological partnerships, reactor maintenance, new construction and more.
I believe more recently there was an expose about some other politicians at that time having links to Russia, although don’t have them to hand right now.
Or more probably, it's imputable to biology and the natural replacement of the "old guard" by adults who didn't grow up during nukes schizophrenia. Or in other words, I doubt that those folks reasoned themselves out of the irrational fear for nuclear energy that they did not reason themselves into.
I'm not sure it's irrational. It's perhaps oversensitive. There are dozens of nuclear power incidents rated at levels of 5+, affecting the wider region.
In the UK, Sellafield was a nightmare. Lots of less serious slip ups and malfunctions punctuated by a few critical incidents, between 1954 and 2003. You might understand why yesterday's Green Party might think it an issue worth pursuing.
As other people have mentioned, it's very likely not the same people; but rather more anti-nuclear people leaving the organization or dying, and more pro-nuclear people joining.
I find it fairly amusing that "green" parties were ever opposed to nuclear power. It was clearly lobbying by fossil fuel energy interests. If we're gonna generate electricity at night without burning coal, oil or gas, we need nuclear. Storing solar and wind overnight is an even more absurd proposition than nuclear power plants. Burning more fossil fuels is even more absurd than nuclear power plants.
Once upon a time, there was also the Soviet propaganda effort in the West. Many of the Cold War reactors could be used to produce not just electricity, but fission material for nuclear warheads. Meaning that if you could persuade big countries to give up nuclear energy for good, you'd also reduce your adversary's capability to build and maintain their nuclear arsenal, or preempt its future acquisition in the first place.
Correct, but it still was framing that would be useful to have. If nothing else, because civilian reactors mean there's also a civilian program, an educational program, and the military would like to have that around.
Soviet Union (and later Russia) enacted the propaganda effort against nuclear mainly to prevent the west from ditching their fossil energy. Less western nuclear warheads was secondary goal at best.
This is a bit too cynical. It's impossible to understand the history green parties' opposition to nuclear energy without the context of their opposition to nuclear weapons. The argument went that "civilian" nuclear infrastructure was deeply interconnected with nuclear weapons. They share infrastructure. The existence of a civilian nuclear fuel cycle brings into existence a latent nuclear capability (you may recognize this theme from such films as the United States vs the Islamic Republic). Creating fissile material while avoiding diversion and proliferation requires the secrecy, security, and centralized technocratic control of what activists sometimes called the Atomic State, which they argued was incompatible with liberal democracy. I think these were quite serious arguments, though of course they'd persuade only if you're already bought in on unilateral nuclear disarmament.
You think.. I heard some antinuclear guys opposing fusion because the vessel for fusion reactor would get radioactive, and that is "nuclear waste" (of course, it's not the dangerous, long-term kind).
The neutron radiation around a fusion reactor is far more intense than in any fission reactor, because in fusion reactors most of the produced energy is carried by neutrons.
Any material exposed to neutron radiation will become radioactive. Of course the designers of fusion reactors will attempt to choose only materials that are converted into radioactive isotopes with a short halflife, but until someone demonstrates a working fusion reactor we will not know whether this is possible or the production of some amount of long-life radioactive waste must be accepted.
In my opinion, during the next few decades there are far less chances for fusion reactors to be used as a significant energy source on Earth than for some improved kinds of fission reactors.
In any case neither fission reactors nor fusion reactors are strictly necessary on Earth, but nuclear reactors are the only way to achieve interplanetary travel through the Solar System in decent times, so I believe that the future of nuclear reactors is for spaceships, not for terrestrial use.
I've commented before on this, but I don't think it ever becomes financially viable.
Assuming all the physics are completely solved tomorrow;
Private capital can easily get better returns, not to mention sooner returns, doing pretty much anything else.
Public capital requires a very long-term govt spend spanning multiple governments. China could do it, but hard to see a western govt doing it. Plus it would add a decade to the schedule and costs would spiral upwards.
All of which is a huge bet against improvements in grid-level storage.
Wow when nuclear power was the answer why we’re against it, but now nuclear power is too expensive compared with renewables plus solar they are for it.
How about some useful policies like removing planning constraints for grid expansion and solar farms and compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires
Nuclear power is not too expensive, it's expense is artificial. Also - renewables can't provide base load energy to replace mos of carbon stuff. You need a powerful base load to support most renewables in the mix
It would be less expensive if every 20 years some idiots wouldn't blow one of them up and render a sizable swath of land uninhabitable by doing something regarded. The cost is in making sure they don't and unfortunately it's probably here to stay.
It's actually 100% worth it even with 1 fukishima every 20 years.
There are literally 0 confirmed deaths to due exposure at Fukishima. Zero.
Literally installing solar panels is more dangerous. Most of the are will be recoverable in a few decades.
The wars in Russia, Iran and frankly the entire Iraqi conflicts, and Yemen as well - are all 'Oil Wars'. Without high Oil prices and global dependency - none of that would exist.
If we had followed through with buidling out nuclear from the 1980s - and did it safely, we might have 1 more Fukishima, and also learned from it (there are htings about Fukishima that should have never happened) - and most of the West would have 50-65% base load from Nuclear.
We may very well have had all electric cars 20 years sooner and Oil would be used for jet fuel and a few other things. Maybe not even that, as we can synthesize fuel with electricity already.
The 1990s called. They want their energy economics back.
Even back then, those economic comparisons were idealized for nuclear. Build it run it count up to the dollars and there you go. Except you need to secure it, you need to handle waste, and roughly the same cost over runs are bedeviling decommissioning as they were construction.
On top of all that, why is nuclear still uninsurable in the private market?
The cost of Nuclear has raised in the same way every other civil industrial project has risen.
A pipeline in Canada was supposed to be $8B it cost $30, subways and tunnels go 3-5x over budget because the actors can extract that wealth.
Think of the builders like Nvidia - they are not incented to build something for 'cost plus' - they want to make sure they suck all of the surpluses out they can. Why build for $10B when you can build for $35B?
Contractors are incented to price all the way to the point where it's 'not viable'.
Thats why with oligarchic vendors, you will never, ever have cheap energy. Never. Because the supply chain will take all the surplus. That's why we have competition. Groceries are not like that.
Insurance - this is a debilitating issues stopping nuclear because there's no way to know what the outcome would be. We don't know how the courts would rule on damages if there was a problem.
This is something that has to be socialized, at least on some level.
Farmers and property owners have to 'live with' the fact there are 300f monstrous windmills obstructing their view for the public good. It's minor but very real. In a more extreme case, we have to contend with the fact there are certain cases in which people may have to 'vacate their properties' in some cases. How do we compensate? It's hard to say, but that has to be worked out and made clear otherwise nothing will get built.
Regulations around storage are another problem - governments have not pushed hard enough for material solutions, kicking the can down the road because just leaving the problem sit in pools beside reactors was 'good enough'. Were we to have invested this for decades we would be much further along.
US, Canada and France etc. have pretty good records, though the US situation is too 'open' it could be tightened, and there's no reason we couldn't have already 35%-50% base nuclear energy all over North America.
You really are a time traveler from the 1990s. In your comment below you say "Batteries are far too expensive, we're still a couple of decades out for that." Even excluding battery chemistry that are designed for bulk use like sodium ion, solar plus batteries is far cheaper than nuclear power. Today.
You think it's axiomatic that the insurability of nuclear power has to be socialized. Insurability is a strong and reliable financial signal. We're seeing this every day in the tech industry now with data center build out that needs credit default swaps. If you can't buy insurance at any price, it's probably not going to end well.
Yep, and renewables + batteries are only getting cheaper. Nuclear takes a long time to build. A new plant planned today will be obsolete before construction ends.
Nuclear fans on HN don’t get that nuclear was the answer in the 90s, but is not today.
The problems in the U.K. specifically are more about grid capacity (both long distance and local substation level) and nonsense regulations (why can’t I have pluggable battery to go with my pluggable solar) than in generation.
Citation needed. For example Flamanville 3 (France) was estimated to cost around €3.3 billion, costs ballooned to over €13-19 billion. There are other similar examples such as Hinkley Point C (UK). Also maintenance is much more expensive and don't forget the cost for storing nuclear waste + decomissioning. Compare that to renewables...
Nuclear costs $16B/GW. Solar $1B/GW nominal. Batteries $1B for 1GW/4GWh. Figure out how much solar overcapacity and batteries you can get, within a year or two, for the price of a nuclear reactor deployable 10-20 years from now.
Interesting claims. Where are you getting those numbers?
And do you actually believe they are comparable?
German nuclear plants were producing for less than 2 cents/ kWh. Firm, day + night, summer + winter, profitable.
Intermittent renewables cost multiples of that and require massive subsidies on top and are allowed to place the burden of their intermittency on the firm producers on top of that.
So you claim as representative, not the average and not the median of nuclear power plants.
But the most expensive nuclear power plants ever produced.
Even without knowing any details about those plants, that's either statistical illiteracy or malpractice. Take your pick.
And it doesn't get better when you know the details:
- The ones you picked were all First of a Kind build (FOAK). So prototypes. It is well-documented that FOAK builds typically are 50% more expensive and longer to build than serialized builds (Nth of a Kind, NOAK). These were more around 100% longer than NOAK, for a bunch of reasons.
- A number of these were the EPR. The EPR has since been discontinued, because the manufacturer found it too hard to build. It has been replaced by the highly simplified EPR2. How is a discontinued reactor type representative of future builds?
- All of these builds were in countries that had a long hiatus in nuclear construction, so had to build up experience in the workforce, supply chain and regulators, so FOAK on steroids. Even the most experienced, France, had a gap of 18 years between the start of the previous build and the start of FV3.
- All of these builds had regulatory changes during the construction process. Sometimes massive changes, for example over 4000 changes for HPC in the UK. And not trivial things: the concrete of the outer protective shell had to be increased by 40% or something. Which has knock-on effects, because now things inside don't quite fit any longer. etc.
- New construction techniques such as modularization, factory production etc. all decrease the cost of serialized builds, but vastly increase the risk during First of a Kind builds.
And of course you are comparing installed capacity, which is an almost completely irrelevant metric. In the UK, capacity factors for solar are between 9-12%. So you have to multiply your solar numbers by 10 just to get equivalent output on average. Except average is not good enough. There is winter, there is night, there are clouds. 4h of battery are not going to get you through winter.
And you "forgot" that nuclear power plants last much, much longer than solar installations, at least twice as long, more likely 3 times and possibly 4 times. All of the plants in the US that have applied have been approved for 80 years of operations, they are now looking at 100 years and see no significant problems.
So without even taking into account new developments, you have to divide the nuclear numbers you gave by 2 and multiply the numbers for PV you gave by at least 20-80 (and that's not covering winter yet).
So $8B/GW vs. $20-80B/GW without any firming.
And which is why the price for installed capacity is not the right metric at all.
The cost of a kWh delivered reliably 24/7 is the right metric. And there nuclear shines.
And intermittents are simply not up to the job. Which is why pretty much the entire world is giving up on the fantasy of supplying an advanced industrial society using only intermittent renewables. And even the most hard-core anti-nuclear greens are coming around, as TFA reports.
As I wrote: Germany's nuclear power plants delivered reliable electricity at below 2 cents per kWh.
One of the useful policies mentioned in the article is:
> Last year, Adrian Ramsay, then a Green co-leader, criticised government support for Sizewell C. “The money being spent on this nuclear gamble would be far better spent on insulating and retrofitting millions of homes, bringing down energy bills and keeping people warmer and more comfortable,” he said.
Classic negawatt approach, to use Amory Lovins' term.
Seems, though, like most people would rather build impressive infrastructure than improve what's already there. Grid expansion and new energy production development have far more cachet than paying a bunch of people with white vans to go around fixing up houses.
Well actually given the free fall in prices of renewables and batteries, not really.
Nuclear costs $16B/GW. Solar $1B/GW nominal. Batteries $1B for 1GW/4GWh.
Figure out how much solar overcapacity and batteries you can get, within a year or two, for the price of a nuclear reactor deployable 10-20 years from now.
They were never were in control of the government, so it seems a conspiracy theory that the greens somehow did "a lot of damage". I think a conspiracy needed by people who can not deal with the fact that nuclear is simply not economical, and therefor fails on the market.
It was ultimately a conservative government that was responsible for exiting nuclear in Germany. But also nobody wants nuclear back, not even the industry - as it is too expensive.
Pretty much, especially with their latest mess with “Zionism is racism” entryism, a leader who can’t lead, and a split between those interested in green subjects and rump Corbynites
There is a very very strong pro-nuclear contingent on HN and in tech in general, and most of the tech pro-nuclear support comes from viewing nuclear as environmentally positive compared to alternatives, so I'm not surprised at all to see this. It hits all the right "this is good" receptors, even if UK Greens are a tiny party. (I personally view nuclear as completely infeasible, economically, while also being environmentally friendly, so I've had few allies on any grounds when it comes to public debate on nuclear.)
The best time to build up nuclear power was 4 decades ago - when the supply of fossil fuel was obviously fraught, and things like solar and wind power were nonviable.
Whether it makes any sense to push for nuclear power now is unclear. Nuclear was quite expensive even back then - but decades of NIMBYism, "environmental" activism and overregulation have damaged the industrial capability and eroded supply chains to the point that getting a buildout going at scale, on a sane budget and a sensible timetable would be an uphill battle. At the same time, renewables aren't anywhere near as opposed, the economic outlook for solar, wind and grid storage is better than it ever was, and the situation is likely to improve even further.
The background here is that people didn't really trust the individuals or institutions involved with nuclear power, and those same individuals and institutions weren't exactly enthusiastic about a new form of energy.
I'm not so sure I agree. A big turning point in my thinking was reading a mid 1980s Forbes piece that investigated several other factors that stopped more US nuclear builds. Perhaps most of all was lack of need, there were too many starts resulting in a glut of nuclear power. Second, construction projects were frequently over budget, meaning the power wasn't as cheap as everybody anticipated. Third, yes, there were mid-construction design changes but that was only on a fraction of projects that were already way behind.
Look over at France, frequently touted as a "successful" buildout. But reactors got more expensive the more they built, not cheaper, and they never met their initial goals for number of builds.
And look at the one place with modern-day "successful" builds: China. They like to tout the reactors as great successes, and they are on time and on budget, or at least as on budget as we can tell in an economic system like that. But they missed their 2020 and 2025 five year plan goals for deployment, and will miss their 2030 goal too. Meanwhile, they deploy 20x-30x as much wind and solar each year, each tech. That's after adjusting for capacity factor! So the best nuclear builders in the world are only building enough of it to be low single digits of their energy mix.
Nuclear was always oversold as a technology, always underdelivered, and has not seen a positive learning curve that a normal technology would. It was doomed from the start, IMHO.
They were, but the current popularity of the 2 main parties (in recent times) has led to this or a couple of right wing ones as a popular protest vote.
There are three Green Parties in the UK. The SGP members have had a supply agreement with the ruling SNP in the Scottish Parliament for years. There was even talk of them being in coalition for a while.
We're familiar with the Green point of view, your niche parties are like NGOs in the US. I think the larger context might be the conversation about technology we've been having in the US since the atom bomb. Articles about nuclear power, GMO, AI, and other advances will trigger similar interest. The timeliness of this article isn't a factor, it's an interesting event and a chance to broach a few topics.
I think a lot of Anti Nuclear Power is based off old designs that weren't as safe and had radioactive byproduct I think newer reactor designs take a lot of bite out of that process. Additionally when you look at what is proposed to happen with Fusion reactors in Virginia in the next couple years it becomes a less popular position to be in opposition.
I was curious and did the reading. The technology still doesn't exist as far as I can tell. Even according to the Commonwealth Fusion Systems who says they will build in Virginia.
The International Atomic Energy Association says:
> there are still some technological issues to address before a commercial power plant can operate. A prototype of a fusion reactor (DEMO) is expected to be built by 2040. [1]
I wish Commonwealth Fusion Systems to sucessed in the plan for commercial fusion electricity production, but they still have many technical problems to solve. They will probably demostrate fusion containment with fusion energy gain factor greater then 1 (more like 10), the primary goal.
But fusion power plants needs to breed and separare tritium, prevent excessive tritium losses in the first wall. The plasma-facing materials in tokamak are subject to very harsh conditions, mutch harder conditions then reactor walls in a fission power plant.
My Anti Nuclear Power is not based on the technology, which is awesome, but on the external factors.
Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
No private insurer wants to insure a nuclear power plant because the potential payout is gargantuan. So it is the country the one that has to insure it.
Nuclear waste maybe will get reprocessed one of these decades if we really get very lucky, but it is expensive and gets in the way of the profits. So we create a shell company to deal with it, and if it happens something, we bankrupt the shell company and the country has to pay it, again. We get to keep the profits, of course.
What if an accident happens? Well, the country is insuring it, so they have to pay for it. We don't have to be that careful anymore, we don't have to pay for it!
But there are 32 layers of protection, nothing bad will ever happen! We are going to a world with more active wars. Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Nuclear would be great if it, and the world, would be run by responsible adults, not by profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.
I could see this maybe working using a standardized sensor reporting system that goes into some third party/government/public analysis. Full sensor array stream, and whatever is used internally to make decisions, up for scrutiny.
Repeat after me:
Technology solutions don't fix human problems.
Your sensor reporting system will be forced to report whatever is needed - regardless of the reality of the situation - as soon as the right manager demands more uptime to an engineer, or otherwise they get fired because leadership demands more profit.
Yeah, I used to have a lot more faith in companies being responsible, but no longer. Instead what we've been seeing is that companies cannot be trusted with vital infrastructure. Every single time they manage to integrate, they all turn into worse versions of Mr. Burns. Our economic system is setup to reward corner cutting and a race to the bottom. If an nuclear plant ends up melting down, our publicly funded nuclear insurance steps in to clean up the mess and the LLC goes bankrupt. Meanwhile, everyone that invested walks away with all the wealth they've siphoned, which they siphoned more of by cutting corners.
And what's nuts is they can walk away with those profits, buy another nuclear company, and repeat the same process until the same inevitable outcome happens.
We need reform. At a minimum we need make it impossible to have things like LLCs in charge of companies where failure result in huge negative externalities. The owners need to be at risk at going bankrupt. Without that risk, they'll just keep destroying everything so long as it makes an extra buck.
If we look at mining companies, we kind of know that society will carry most of the risk and negative externalities, so regulations must exist to limit how and to what degree companies can operate.
If a mining company extract lead and silver from the ground, we kind of know that they won't be around to safeguard waste for all eternity, nor will they be able to restore the environment when the company eventually goes bankrupt. If society want to allow such commercial operations then it need to also strike a balance so that society don't have to bear too much of the negative externalities.
In Sweden, the goverment here owns the energy company that operate the nuclear power plants and the mining company.
> Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Of course like in the well known capitalist regime of the USSR that precipitated the big nuclear problem. If only we had the government instead of the evil capitalists to run things then we could be safe from those profit maximizing parasites.
The point of the hypersonic missile catastrophe was something I had not considered and is an excellent point. I think that is true with all critical infrastructure to some extent but a nuclear reactor would certainly have more fallout. I wonder if any designs have thought about that situation.
Nuclear conrainment buildings are the strongest non-military structures build, you need a specialized bunker buster munition to penetrate them.
Under the current aircraft protection rules, the containment building has to survive impact of a fully loaded large civilian airplane moving at speed of sound.
For example testing of samples of containment building was done using acceleration of F-4 Phantom mounted on rocket sledge towards the wall. The wall survived the impact without problems.
Such anti-nuclear has some validity, but only if we can agree that burning fuel for energy and heat should not continue. Constructing new power plants and central heating systems that rely on burning fuel should be imminently stopped, and all existing plants should have their remaining life time determined and then sunset when they reach it. Any argument of external factors for nuclear are dwarfed by the external factors from burning fuel for energy and heat, double so for profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.
The biggest reason the world is seeing more active was is that we are dependent on a few unstable countries for our energy needs. Solar and wind power can produce very cheap energy when the weather is optimal, but suboptimal weather can equally produce extremely expensive prices to the point where social and economical stability start to break down. We are giving money to warmongering oligarchs because of the fear of what happens if prices goes up to high, which would not happen if energy and heating infrastructure was secure and geopolitical independent.
> only if we can agree that burning fuel for energy and heat should not continue.
Unless you accidentally left out "fossil", as in "burning fossil fuel", then we at least are unlikely to agree.
I certainly intend to continue to gather tree waste and burn it - and I cannot see a problem if forest weight is maintained through replenishment and replacement.
It is good to recycle tree waste and it's already done on industrial scale. But there are not enough forests in the word to replace our consumption of fossil fuels.
For example Denmark is importing lot of wood from Baltics, UK lot of wood from Canada.
Wood waste is primarily a green washing method. True tree waste is very minimal today in quantity, and most wood "waste" is actually used for a lot of products like paper and ply wood, and what is left to burn when everything is used are not enough to power a nation for any duration. In term of pollution it reduces air quality, and in term of sustainability there aren't enough forests around to use wood as the main fuel for all the power needs we have when renewables can't deliver.
Burning wood has at best similar environmental impact as beef. In theory it can be produced using just "waste", but we have to extend the word "waste" beyond recognition when the profit-maximizing locusts become part of the picture. The world is suffering from deforestation.
We are not talking about using garden waste to burn a log in a open fire place, but rather grid sized power plants and central heating plants. I should however mention that there are air quality reports that points to issues with individual homes burning wood inside cities. Open air fireplaces do not scale well with high density population areas.
> Cutting down massive amount of forests just for the purpose of burning it up is harmful to the environment
Err, lets perhaps stick with
* Cutting down massive amount of old growth forest is harmful to the environment ( whether it's for burning or bauxite )
and
* Cutting down forest faster than regrowth rate is harmful to the environment (as that's net loss wrt surface sequestration)
and perhaps examine "harmful to bio diversity" (is it? checker-boarded plantation forest has about the same biodiversity as it ever has - it's not old-growth but it's not devoid of life or diversity), "dangerous to humans" (really? with modern logging machines on plantation forest? - the deaths in logging largely come from non plantation clearing on steep slopes and happen to humans aware of the risks)
> True tree waste is very minimal today
Is it? Many people hereabout heat their homes from limb lopping, dead fall, and tree deaths.
> not enough to power a nation for any duration
I don't recall suggesting powering a nation - just pointing out that there's an acceptable attrition rate for forests.
> Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Just like commercial aviation companies then, right?
> Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
On average or what?
> Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
What's "solar"? A solar panel? Sure. Solar+8h worth of batteries? Maybe. Solar+enough batteries to guarantee a stable grid? Hmm. Solar+batteries+the externalities of burning fossil fuels to compensate?
> Nuclear waste ...
Let me stop you right there. Head on over to https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/fifteen_minutes and look at how much coal&gas waste (no, not just CO2) we are dumping into the atmosphere at this very moment.
Now go ahead and tell me again that we need to badly find a solution to the huge problem of inert, solid, compact nuclear waste that's just sitting there.
> What if an accident happens?
Idk, what if an accident happens with anything else that's already 99.999% safe, like aviation? Odd question to ask about the objectively safest power source we have.
> Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Right. You're getting attacked by hypersonic missiles and your priority is your nuclear power plant safety.
Empirically, somehow Ukraine is not a nuclear wasteland despite their nuclear power plants being very much under threat of attack by not so sane people.
Why is war never a factor in the nuclear power debate? Like nuclear is great, until you have missiles dropping on your territory. You can ask Ukraine about that. Zaporizhia has been held hostage since the early days of the war. Should the Russians have a manic moment they can make a Chernobyl volume 2 with conventional explosives.
Nuclear is a great peacetime technology, Europe is no longer in peacetime.
Nuclear ICBMs generally make this a moot point. An advanced enemy can explode a "nuclear reactor" anywhere in your country at any time.
Regarding drones, most reactors are built relatively hardened. For example, they're protected against a 747 flying into it at full speed. So even a drone attack would take an advanced enemy, and they might as well drop a bomb on you.
The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam flooded over 500 square kilometres and carried a significant death toll, caused major damage to the surrounding area and impacted over a million people.
Besides maybe solar, there is always the potential for harm during war times. Heck, even with solar, cutting off electricity supply to a major urban area can tragically carry a death toll that goes beyond even the few severe power plant disasters we as a species have ever encountered.
Fission is not an outlier here and designing any power plant for resilience is a necessary step, whether in war or peacetimes, whether in a tectonically stable or seismically active area.
A nuclear strike on a larger fission reactor could create an awful result unlike any other power plant. There were some studies during the cold war (something about the effects in West Germanyin the early 1980s, IIRC).
As opposed to a nuclear strike directly on a populated civilian area with no nuclear power plant nearby which also creates an awful result?
The main difference in nuking a fission plant over any other area would be creating longer-term fallout.
If the attacker is at all rational, unlikely to be desired because it makes the area hard to inaccessible for troops on either side.
If the attacker is horrificaly irrational and just wants to cause pure, long term, irreparable harm, unfortunately salted nukes would be a feasible option, independent of having a fission plant anywhere near the drop zone...
Nuclear disarmament, international cooperation and reliable defence alliances can (hopefully) be used to protect against this, along with resilient fission designs within reason. Not having a fission plant by itself unfortunately and targically wouldn't prevent an utterly irrational attacker willing to cause as much long term damage as possible.
Very aware of that harsh fact, living in a country that has a section in our constitution making nuclear power illegal (yes, very stupid) and is not part of any defensive alliance (while expecting the countries around us to defend us anyways), if someone wanted to "salt the earth" around Salzburg, Vienna or Graz, they could do it, even if we have no plants.
Scale of fallout would be huge. People were kind of shocked by the analysis (trying to remember what came out then... Fetter, early 1980s, Scientific American?).
Between shameless scientific fraud from last century still affecting and harming nuclear policy to this day [0], and masses of idiots being easily influenced and swindled by foreign powers [1] (example specifically about the UK's case), I don't know why any such parties haven't been forcefully disbanded or put in the same category as terrorists, along with other organizations such as "Green"-"peace". They have at large done immeasurable damage to their countries and the world at large, and most of them started out explicitly as being anti-nuclear, that being their only mission for the longest time, only becoming relevant through the most disgusting fearmongering. Most importantly, they've achieved nothing but ensure the continued, worldwide permanent reliance on oil states and the terrorism that derived from it.
Yeah, this might well not be any individual human being changing their mind, but rather new human beings less inclined to be anti-nuclear-power now forming a critical mass within the UK Green Party.
Third-parties are generally full of eccentrics (remember that the UK is still FPTP, even if they're a multi-party system). Eccentrics typically aren't the "very serious" types looking at tradeoffs.
The large portion of the environmentalist left are degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less, which means "less energy" is actually good. It will never be a politically viable position, but again, we're talking about a party that until recently has never come close to wielding power.
It doesn't matter if it's "good" or "bad" if it's not a politically viable position.
That I think it's an idiotic position is beside the point. Things and prosperity generally are not the problem, and can grow pretty much indefinitely for the foreseeable future if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.
> if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.
There are a lot of things that would work fine if done in a reasonable and safe way but we have plenty of examples of people making unreasonable and unsafe decisions.
Yes this is an extremely bad thing. Degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less are enemies of human progress and flourishing. I do not want people like that to have any political power.
Less doesn't have to mean less comfort. There's a lot of unnecessary consumption these days. People buying stuff they never use. Stuff that breaks and can't be repaired even though the owner would prefer that.
And most of these things have impact much bigger than just the climate. They pollute in a lot more ways than that. Resource extraction, manufacturing pollution, transport, waste disposal.
It's stuff like forcing repairability that allows us to do with much less impact on the environment.
Degrowthers just believed climate scientists that there is a problem and then believed climate deniers when they said none of the solutions work.
If you accept both of these then like Vaclav Smil, you'll conclude that you need to use less fossil fuels and nothing else will replace them. And if you care about fairness globally then 1st world nations need to really use less.
It all makes perfect sense if you believe all the lies told about renewables.
Most of the people mocking it helped spread those lies, which makes attacking the people who believe them a bit rude.
The solution was, and still is, urbanism and electrification… not living with less.
Literally the leftist dense cities have been the ones pushing back hardest against high rises, sustainable transportation alternatives, and in large part, electrification through overly restrictive environmental laws designed in the 70s.
That’s over now. Climate change is here, and you still can’t convert a house to a duplex in LA without jumping through a thousand hoops.
I oppose nuclear for a very simple reason: there is no way to deal with the long term waste. Not just the small amount of waste from the fuel, but the reactor components.
The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia and the reason? Our current consumption
Such greed and disregard for following generations
I don't think it accumulates enough solid waste to worry about. I'm Aussie, and I'm in favour of a proposal I heard a while ago to let other countries export their concentrated nuclear waste to the middle of Australia. Just bury it in one spot, on the oldest, most geologically stable landmass on the planet. It's far from bodies of water, it's far from population centres (excepting Alice Springs).
That said solar panels and batteries are so bloody good now, why even bother building nuclear reactors in much of the world? And geothermal looks promising too, with the new fracking tech they're using. But who knows.
Mt Isa Mines when done is a good spot, and as a bonus you largely get to avoid issues with indigenous opposition since the area is already suitably dug up.
Reading down through that, there are exceptions built in already for research waste, medical waste, waste from "a nuclear vessel" (ie. submarines), and generic "waste that needs to buried for safety reason".
I drove through Nevada recently and it made me angry how much flat, high sun, land there is for solar, with no real environmental impact whatsoever (probably improvement for local life from the bit of shade).
Nevada also has the geology and part of a repository built already for nuclear waste. But Las Vegas controls the state and so those empty holes sit unused.
This is also true of central Australia - dry, cloudless places that are good locations for solar panel arrays are also good places to store spent nuclear waste. There is the issue that solar panel efficiency drops somewhat in hot weather, but yeah there should be way more photovoltaic solar power in the American southwest, including Nevada.
Would indigenous Australians living near proposed sites object to this plan? Are there areas of Australia with no human population? My impression is that nomadic indigenous groups used a lot of land in Australia even far from permanent settlements.
Climate change is a consequence of fearmongering against cleaner solutions. We have methods for handling radioactive waste safely- whether it's vitrification and dropping it in subduction zones, or just putting it deep underground in wastelands, there are lots of solutions that are infinitely better than the status quo.
Coal waste will be a larger problem to deal with for future generations than nuclear waste will be. The burning coal of course has shortened the lives of millions and been a major contributor to green house gases. If you oppose both coal and nuclear, how should the world have generated electrical power from say 1950 to 2000?
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
No one knows what the best and worst case scenarios for deaths during to climate change as they effects might include AMOC shutdown, sea level rise, forced mass migrations of people, wars, shortages of food, etc. In all credible scenarios the deaths and suffering in even the best case scenarios will be much, much, higher than any deaths due to radiation exposure from nuclear waste.
>there is no way to deal with the long term waste.
Yes there is, bury it. Its what we do with lots of other waste. Of course, you have to be a bit more careful than you would be with a standard landfill. But the engineering is well understood. It is usually just the fact that nobody wants it buried near them that causes political issues.
>The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia
Pumping more carbon into the atmosphere is also a huge burden for future generations.
That's not true, we know enough about geology to deal with long term waste.
Nuclear waste is great for several reasons:
- the first one is quantity: very small in comparison with how much energy it produced (a nuclear reaction generates one million times more energy than a chemical reaction so less resource usage across the whole lifecycle);
- the second one is that most of it (over 90%) can be recycled and used with gen 4 reactors;
- the third one is that it stays local, i.e. unlike CO2 it doesn't go into the atmosphere (and then the ocean), and since CO2 is inert, from a human time scale how long CO2 can stay in the atmosphere is, I would argue, comparable to nuclear waste decay.
It was part emotional response to Chernobyl, part is was full on Russian propaganda infiltrating parliaments in Europe.
The leader of Germany that phased out nuclear and made Germany fully reliant on Russia then took a job... at Gazprom. The VP from the Greens responsible took a very high paying job lobbying for foreign Gas firms, too.
It has to be one of the most successful foreign influencing campaigns in history.
Yep, it did. And (brown)coal kills much more people and the dependence on Russian gas made the geopolitics much worse than any nuclear reactor ever would.
The chances of a Soviet leadership-induced meltdown like at a German nuclear reactor that is properly designed and maintained is laughable.
It is, however, extremely hard to film the slow killing of people by browncoal. It's easy to film a nuclear reactor incident.
I think we can agree that people are not in general making purely statistical decisions when it comes to what risks are acceptable and which ones are not.
German TV had local experts who could tell the audience in real time that the authorities in Fukishsima were lying about the unfolding disaster.
A slightly racist belief in the Japanese as superior at following the rules meant a big shock when the Germans realised that even the Japanese could not be trusted with nuclear power.
It's perfectly understandable, if you allow that most peoples' understanding of nuclear safety is not perfect. Chernobyl and 3 mile island, but also Hiroshima and Nagasaki- atomic power's dangers get a lot more press than when it works quietly and reliably.
Sure, you and I can talk about newer plant designs that fail safely, or about how coal plants emit more radiation by far. But if we had the ability to rapidly convince large swathes of the populace of provable scientific facts, then clean power is only one of the many many problems we would be able to solve.
> I've never understood the opposition to nuclear power.
Part of it was a Soviet psyop to get Western citizens to oppose West's nuclear weapons. Encourage people to oppose nuclear in general, both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
It was absolutely not almost a second Chernobyl. Saying this proves you understand very little of what happened in the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents.
Correct, because they managed to prevent it from becoming a second Chernobyl. At Chernobyl they failed to prevent it from becoming a first Chernobyl. But we don't want to keep rolling the dice just because the last time we got a 6.
No it was never possible for Fukushima to become a Chernobyl style disaster because it has a containment structure and the biggest difference is that Fukushima was basic overheating while Chernobyl was a complex power excursion of over 100GW. There was never a runaway nuclear explosion at Fukushima; it was a severe thermodynamic failure of cooling.
The end result can be the same. The disaster at Chernobyl wasn't the uncontrolled chain reaction - if that had been all that happened, the town of Chernobyl would still be considered inhabitable. The ionisation plume was pretty, but not dangerous to anyone who wasn't in it. The disaster at Chernobyl was that the building blew up (because of the chain reaction) and the explosion spread radioactive stuff for miles. Fukushima was also going to blow up, due to hydrogen gas IIRC, but they prevented it from blowing up.
You keep proving you don't understand what actually happened at Chernobyl or have a sense of scale of the energies involved. Hydrogen gas exploding is a completely different thing than a badly designed reactor instantly generating over 100 times its designed output and exploding. The hydrogen gas did explode at Fukushima and this damaged the outer building. Fukushima was a firecracker compared to Chernobyl being an actual nuclear bomb.
And who cares about the 150 000 displaced people and the still existing exclusion zone?
Oh, yeah, because the Fukushima nuclear accident is still ongoing. The plant is still too dangerous to access and dismantle. Cooling water is still pumped into the reactors to keep them from melting down. That water is still contaminated by a mixture of radioelements and being released to the ocean after partial treatment. And this will go on for several decades still.
There was no need for a mass evacuation because of Fukushima, it was a overreaction caused by irrational fear of nuclear power. The evacuation itself caused much harm. It is pretty silly to hype an incident that caused ZERO deaths as some kind of horrible nuclear disaster.
Oposition to nuclear is much older, it started is oposition to nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon tests and in generation was part of the global peace movements and anti-cold war and anti-Vietnam war movements.
For example Greenpeace had it roots in the oposition to nuclear weapon testing at the end of 1960s.
Why is it that almost every top comment or top reply on HB loves to pretend they know what they're talking about while making almost no fucking sense.
You got one guy on here claiming a fusion reactor will be built in Virginia (lol). Yet another claiming that the reason that everyone hates nuclear power is because of the byproduct of nuclear waste and that it's worse than climate change (rofl). Like what kind of drugs are you people on?
It loses on accounting if you assign zero cost to the million+ lives that carbon emitting power generation takes every year, and the long term, possibly irreversible damage it does to the planet. If you factor in those two things even 1%, nuclear wins hands down
Cost of recent nuclear power in the UK comes in at $130/mwh at best. Where wind and solar are coming in at $50-80/MWh.
So for the same rate of investment you can decarbonize 2-3 times faster. And that doesn't figure the long lead times for nuclear vs solar, wind and batteries.
It wouldn't be any better, because if plants had been built decades ago, they wouldn't be able to be competitive anymore, would keep running a deficit, and would depress the economy and public finances like the white elephants they are, and take away means to transition to renewables.
jmclnx | 16 hours ago
There are aspects of many political parties I agree with, but to me, being against Nuclear Power is the largest short sighted items this and a couple of other parties are/were against.
If many countries took the same road as France, the world would be in a much better place. Imagine the energy advances that could have happened if nuclear was supported for the past 50 years.
mitxela | 15 hours ago
chrismustcode | 15 hours ago
Also France is around 7c (euro) per kwh from nuclear generation. If the whole west was all in on nuclear for last 50 years it would have resulted in lower per kwh costs.
OJFord | 15 hours ago
eldaisfish | 15 hours ago
Nuclear doesn't need to be the only source of electricity generation. In fact, it can be the base on top of which a serious country expands electricity generation with renewable energy.
I will also remind you that there is not a single industrialised economy anywhere on earth that has successfully supplied new electricity growth with only renewable energy. Not one.
ZeroGravitas | 15 hours ago
Nuclear fans across the internet seems to have adopted this talking point recently and none of them have noticed it doesn't make any sense.
What are you even claiming here?
hdgvhicv | 14 hours ago
And that you can’t scale nuclear to provide all the power as the peaks are only needed rarely.
Which means that when other sources are cheaper (renewables), those must be banned to ensure nuclear gets paid more?
rjsw | 15 hours ago
tadfisher | 15 hours ago
jdlshore | 15 hours ago
We’re already in a situation where we have more power than we need during certain hours of the day in some states/countries, and that’s not even counting the massive, accelerating buildout that will happen between now and the years before new nuclear is built… even it was started today.
adrianN | 15 hours ago
InsideOutSanta | 16 hours ago
petcat | 15 hours ago
PorciiVorbesc | 15 hours ago
If only. There's people and parties (not in the UK) who would rather see the rest of the country suffer than admit they were wrong, so they feel compelled to die on that hill and take everyone with them, because defending their principle is more important.
notarobot123 | 15 hours ago
croes | 15 hours ago
petcat | 15 hours ago
RandomLensman | 15 hours ago
slopinthebag | 15 hours ago
RandomLensman | 15 hours ago
slopinthebag | 15 hours ago
we have the right to criticise countries too right?
RandomLensman | 15 hours ago
slopinthebag | 14 hours ago
RandomLensman | 14 hours ago
slopinthebag | 14 hours ago
RandomLensman | 14 hours ago
Edit: what is your point? Being able to criticize? Sure, but so what?
slopinthebag | 14 hours ago
adrianN | 15 hours ago
petcat | 15 hours ago
But Germany wanted the cheap gas, so they ignored the risks and Russia ultimately invaded Ukraine.
RandomLensman | 15 hours ago
uecker | 14 hours ago
But regarding gas, one has to understand that a tiny fraction (15%) of gas is used for electricity and most for heating. So nuclear power is completely irrelevant here.
I also would like people realize that many nuclear plants in Europe and elsewhere still depend on fuel from Russia. So energy dependence is a bit more complex.
croes | 14 hours ago
petcat | 12 hours ago
uecker | 14 hours ago
ACCount39 | 15 hours ago
Unlike fossil fuel power plants, NPPs don't depend on a steady supply of a high volume of costly consumables just to keep running. Reactor fuel loads last months to years, naturally buffering any price shocks or supply chain issues. And you can maintain an "energy security" stockpile of nuclear fuel that would add you even more years of runaway.
To have your nuclear power disrupted, you have to face an adversary that's both capable and willing to hit targets on your soil, and on top of that, is willing to target NPP infrastructure specifically.
A random rogue state lobbing mid-range drones over a strait wouldn't cut it. Neither would a war halfway around the world.
croes | 8 hours ago
To attack you just need an inside man and an USB stick to fake an accident.
And with the AfD they get the information about critical infrastructure free of charge
prymitive | 15 hours ago
“People act reasonably when left no other choice”
It stuck with me.
ViewTrick1002 | 15 hours ago
Meanwhile renewables and storage are reshaping our global energy system due to being the cheapest globally scalable energy source in human history.
We also need to keep in mind nuclear supply chains. After 21 sanction packages the EU still haven't sanctioned Russia's nuclear industry.
We're simply too deeply entangled across the entire supply chain: nuclear fuel, enrichment, reprocessing, technological partnerships, reactor maintenance, new construction and more.
ransom1538 | 15 hours ago
mitxela | 15 hours ago
doublepg23 | 15 hours ago
Definitely risks in the supply chain there, but probably less than Russia?
rrr_oh_man | 15 hours ago
What do you mean?
deltaknight | 15 hours ago
E.g the ex chancellor is now paid handsomely https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...
I believe more recently there was an expose about some other politicians at that time having links to Russia, although don’t have them to hand right now.
coherentpony | 15 hours ago
croes | 15 hours ago
Or the panic when the next drones appear near a power plant
declan_roberts | 15 hours ago
ezst | 15 hours ago
fsckboy | 15 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
oliwarner | 15 hours ago
In the UK, Sellafield was a nightmare. Lots of less serious slip ups and malfunctions punctuated by a few critical incidents, between 1954 and 2003. You might understand why yesterday's Green Party might think it an issue worth pursuing.
JuniperMesos | 13 hours ago
hnuser123456 | 16 hours ago
inglor_cz | 15 hours ago
mitxela | 15 hours ago
bluGill | 15 hours ago
Marha01 | 15 hours ago
arborescence | 15 hours ago
ChocolateGod | 15 hours ago
Marha01 | 15 hours ago
adrian_b | 14 hours ago
For now this is only a desire, not a fact.
The neutron radiation around a fusion reactor is far more intense than in any fission reactor, because in fusion reactors most of the produced energy is carried by neutrons.
Any material exposed to neutron radiation will become radioactive. Of course the designers of fusion reactors will attempt to choose only materials that are converted into radioactive isotopes with a short halflife, but until someone demonstrates a working fusion reactor we will not know whether this is possible or the production of some amount of long-life radioactive waste must be accepted.
In my opinion, during the next few decades there are far less chances for fusion reactors to be used as a significant energy source on Earth than for some improved kinds of fission reactors.
In any case neither fission reactors nor fusion reactors are strictly necessary on Earth, but nuclear reactors are the only way to achieve interplanetary travel through the Solar System in decent times, so I believe that the future of nuclear reactors is for spaceships, not for terrestrial use.
bruce511 | 15 hours ago
Assuming all the physics are completely solved tomorrow;
Private capital can easily get better returns, not to mention sooner returns, doing pretty much anything else.
Public capital requires a very long-term govt spend spanning multiple governments. China could do it, but hard to see a western govt doing it. Plus it would add a decade to the schedule and costs would spiral upwards.
All of which is a huge bet against improvements in grid-level storage.
hdgvhicv | 15 hours ago
How about some useful policies like removing planning constraints for grid expansion and solar farms and compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires
acidburnNSA | 15 hours ago
Zigurd | 15 hours ago
ZeroGravitas | 15 hours ago
For existing nuclear, stealing it from the other grid users is cheaper than building clean power today.
acidburnNSA | 15 hours ago
Or.... the full-system economics of renewables may not actually be as good as advocates claim.
jdlshore | 15 hours ago
iknowstuff | 14 hours ago
andyjohnson0 | 15 hours ago
Brit here: we need renewables and storage and nuclear.
> compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires
We need this x100.
bluegatty | 15 hours ago
DangitBobby | 15 hours ago
bluegatty | 11 hours ago
Renewables are a long way off from covering the base load.
They are only now crossing the threshold into 'key supply factors'.
moffkalast | 15 hours ago
bluegatty | 11 hours ago
There are literally 0 confirmed deaths to due exposure at Fukishima. Zero.
Literally installing solar panels is more dangerous. Most of the are will be recoverable in a few decades.
The wars in Russia, Iran and frankly the entire Iraqi conflicts, and Yemen as well - are all 'Oil Wars'. Without high Oil prices and global dependency - none of that would exist.
If we had followed through with buidling out nuclear from the 1980s - and did it safely, we might have 1 more Fukishima, and also learned from it (there are htings about Fukishima that should have never happened) - and most of the West would have 50-65% base load from Nuclear.
We may very well have had all electric cars 20 years sooner and Oil would be used for jet fuel and a few other things. Maybe not even that, as we can synthesize fuel with electricity already.
Zigurd | 14 hours ago
Even back then, those economic comparisons were idealized for nuclear. Build it run it count up to the dollars and there you go. Except you need to secure it, you need to handle waste, and roughly the same cost over runs are bedeviling decommissioning as they were construction.
On top of all that, why is nuclear still uninsurable in the private market?
bluegatty | 11 hours ago
The cost of Nuclear has raised in the same way every other civil industrial project has risen.
A pipeline in Canada was supposed to be $8B it cost $30, subways and tunnels go 3-5x over budget because the actors can extract that wealth.
Think of the builders like Nvidia - they are not incented to build something for 'cost plus' - they want to make sure they suck all of the surpluses out they can. Why build for $10B when you can build for $35B?
Contractors are incented to price all the way to the point where it's 'not viable'.
Thats why with oligarchic vendors, you will never, ever have cheap energy. Never. Because the supply chain will take all the surplus. That's why we have competition. Groceries are not like that.
Insurance - this is a debilitating issues stopping nuclear because there's no way to know what the outcome would be. We don't know how the courts would rule on damages if there was a problem.
This is something that has to be socialized, at least on some level.
Farmers and property owners have to 'live with' the fact there are 300f monstrous windmills obstructing their view for the public good. It's minor but very real. In a more extreme case, we have to contend with the fact there are certain cases in which people may have to 'vacate their properties' in some cases. How do we compensate? It's hard to say, but that has to be worked out and made clear otherwise nothing will get built.
Regulations around storage are another problem - governments have not pushed hard enough for material solutions, kicking the can down the road because just leaving the problem sit in pools beside reactors was 'good enough'. Were we to have invested this for decades we would be much further along.
US, Canada and France etc. have pretty good records, though the US situation is too 'open' it could be tightened, and there's no reason we couldn't have already 35%-50% base nuclear energy all over North America.
Ontario does is quite well.
This should have happened decades ago.
Zigurd | 9 hours ago
You think it's axiomatic that the insurability of nuclear power has to be socialized. Insurability is a strong and reliable financial signal. We're seeing this every day in the tech industry now with data center build out that needs credit default swaps. If you can't buy insurance at any price, it's probably not going to end well.
hdgvhicv | 11 hours ago
[OP] mpweiher | 15 hours ago
It's not.
OKRainbowKid | 15 hours ago
jdlshore | 15 hours ago
hdgvhicv | 10 hours ago
The problems in the U.K. specifically are more about grid capacity (both long distance and local substation level) and nonsense regulations (why can’t I have pluggable battery to go with my pluggable solar) than in generation.
tim1994 | 14 hours ago
[OP] mpweiher | 11 hours ago
iknowstuff | 14 hours ago
[OP] mpweiher | 11 hours ago
And do you actually believe they are comparable?
German nuclear plants were producing for less than 2 cents/ kWh. Firm, day + night, summer + winter, profitable.
Intermittent renewables cost multiples of that and require massive subsidies on top and are allowed to place the burden of their intermittency on the firm producers on top of that.
iknowstuff | 5 hours ago
Batteries: https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design Solar: just google 1gw solar cost
[OP] mpweiher | an hour ago
So you claim as representative, not the average and not the median of nuclear power plants.
But the most expensive nuclear power plants ever produced.
Even without knowing any details about those plants, that's either statistical illiteracy or malpractice. Take your pick.
And it doesn't get better when you know the details:
- The ones you picked were all First of a Kind build (FOAK). So prototypes. It is well-documented that FOAK builds typically are 50% more expensive and longer to build than serialized builds (Nth of a Kind, NOAK). These were more around 100% longer than NOAK, for a bunch of reasons.
- A number of these were the EPR. The EPR has since been discontinued, because the manufacturer found it too hard to build. It has been replaced by the highly simplified EPR2. How is a discontinued reactor type representative of future builds?
- All of these builds were in countries that had a long hiatus in nuclear construction, so had to build up experience in the workforce, supply chain and regulators, so FOAK on steroids. Even the most experienced, France, had a gap of 18 years between the start of the previous build and the start of FV3.
- All of these builds had regulatory changes during the construction process. Sometimes massive changes, for example over 4000 changes for HPC in the UK. And not trivial things: the concrete of the outer protective shell had to be increased by 40% or something. Which has knock-on effects, because now things inside don't quite fit any longer. etc.
- New construction techniques such as modularization, factory production etc. all decrease the cost of serialized builds, but vastly increase the risk during First of a Kind builds.
And of course you are comparing installed capacity, which is an almost completely irrelevant metric. In the UK, capacity factors for solar are between 9-12%. So you have to multiply your solar numbers by 10 just to get equivalent output on average. Except average is not good enough. There is winter, there is night, there are clouds. 4h of battery are not going to get you through winter.
And you "forgot" that nuclear power plants last much, much longer than solar installations, at least twice as long, more likely 3 times and possibly 4 times. All of the plants in the US that have applied have been approved for 80 years of operations, they are now looking at 100 years and see no significant problems.
So without even taking into account new developments, you have to divide the nuclear numbers you gave by 2 and multiply the numbers for PV you gave by at least 20-80 (and that's not covering winter yet).
So $8B/GW vs. $20-80B/GW without any firming.
And which is why the price for installed capacity is not the right metric at all.
The cost of a kWh delivered reliably 24/7 is the right metric. And there nuclear shines.
And intermittents are simply not up to the job. Which is why pretty much the entire world is giving up on the fantasy of supplying an advanced industrial society using only intermittent renewables. And even the most hard-core anti-nuclear greens are coming around, as TFA reports.
As I wrote: Germany's nuclear power plants delivered reliable electricity at below 2 cents per kWh.
notarobot123 | 15 hours ago
That said, it seems neither pragmatism nor ideological coherence is really necessary to hold power these days.
eesmith | 15 hours ago
> Last year, Adrian Ramsay, then a Green co-leader, criticised government support for Sizewell C. “The money being spent on this nuclear gamble would be far better spent on insulating and retrofitting millions of homes, bringing down energy bills and keeping people warmer and more comfortable,” he said.
Classic negawatt approach, to use Amory Lovins' term.
Seems, though, like most people would rather build impressive infrastructure than improve what's already there. Grid expansion and new energy production development have far more cachet than paying a bunch of people with white vans to go around fixing up houses.
Marha01 | 15 hours ago
[OP] mpweiher | 15 hours ago
iknowstuff | 14 hours ago
Figure out how much solar overcapacity and batteries you can get, within a year or two, for the price of a nuclear reactor deployable 10-20 years from now.
[OP] mpweiher | 11 hours ago
uecker | 14 hours ago
bluegatty | 15 hours ago
RandomLensman | 15 hours ago
OKRainbowKid | 15 hours ago
uecker | 14 hours ago
FailMore | 15 hours ago
haunter | 15 hours ago
Are they really?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...
sgjohnson | 15 hours ago
robin_reala | 15 hours ago
hdgvhicv | 15 hours ago
hermitcrab | 14 hours ago
croes | 15 hours ago
epistasis | 15 hours ago
ACCount39 | 15 hours ago
The best time to build up nuclear power was 4 decades ago - when the supply of fossil fuel was obviously fraught, and things like solar and wind power were nonviable.
Whether it makes any sense to push for nuclear power now is unclear. Nuclear was quite expensive even back then - but decades of NIMBYism, "environmental" activism and overregulation have damaged the industrial capability and eroded supply chains to the point that getting a buildout going at scale, on a sane budget and a sensible timetable would be an uphill battle. At the same time, renewables aren't anywhere near as opposed, the economic outlook for solar, wind and grid storage is better than it ever was, and the situation is likely to improve even further.
gopher_space | 14 hours ago
epistasis | 13 hours ago
Look over at France, frequently touted as a "successful" buildout. But reactors got more expensive the more they built, not cheaper, and they never met their initial goals for number of builds.
And look at the one place with modern-day "successful" builds: China. They like to tout the reactors as great successes, and they are on time and on budget, or at least as on budget as we can tell in an economic system like that. But they missed their 2020 and 2025 five year plan goals for deployment, and will miss their 2030 goal too. Meanwhile, they deploy 20x-30x as much wind and solar each year, each tech. That's after adjusting for capacity factor! So the best nuclear builders in the world are only building enough of it to be low single digits of their energy mix.
Nuclear was always oversold as a technology, always underdelivered, and has not seen a positive learning curve that a normal technology would. It was doomed from the start, IMHO.
mikeodds | 15 hours ago
GordonS | 15 hours ago
nephihaha | 15 hours ago
GordonS | 14 hours ago
nephihaha | 15 hours ago
gopher_space | 14 hours ago
adammarples | 13 hours ago
ndsipa_pomu | 9 hours ago
Possibly, but I vote for them and here in Bristol, they control the council and we have a Green Member of Parliament.
They've been around for decades, but they're grabbing more attention and headlines (especially the whole "Zionism is racism" declaration).
papa0101 | 15 hours ago
nephihaha | 15 hours ago
Both Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own Green Parties. There is no single UK Green Party.
jamiepond | 15 hours ago
silver92bullet | 15 hours ago
fn-mote | 14 hours ago
I was curious and did the reading. The technology still doesn't exist as far as I can tell. Even according to the Commonwealth Fusion Systems who says they will build in Virginia.
The International Atomic Energy Association says:
> there are still some technological issues to address before a commercial power plant can operate. A prototype of a fusion reactor (DEMO) is expected to be built by 2040. [1]
[1]: https://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs
Gud | 14 hours ago
Please note the date. This is the reactor being built. CFS has come a long way since inception. DEMO is a joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
leonidasrup | 13 hours ago
But fusion power plants needs to breed and separare tritium, prevent excessive tritium losses in the first wall. The plasma-facing materials in tokamak are subject to very harsh conditions, mutch harder conditions then reactor walls in a fission power plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma-facing_material
javcasas | 14 hours ago
Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
No private insurer wants to insure a nuclear power plant because the potential payout is gargantuan. So it is the country the one that has to insure it.
Nuclear waste maybe will get reprocessed one of these decades if we really get very lucky, but it is expensive and gets in the way of the profits. So we create a shell company to deal with it, and if it happens something, we bankrupt the shell company and the country has to pay it, again. We get to keep the profits, of course.
What if an accident happens? Well, the country is insuring it, so they have to pay for it. We don't have to be that careful anymore, we don't have to pay for it!
But there are 32 layers of protection, nothing bad will ever happen! We are going to a world with more active wars. Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Nuclear would be great if it, and the world, would be run by responsible adults, not by profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.
nomel | 14 hours ago
javcasas | 14 hours ago
Your sensor reporting system will be forced to report whatever is needed - regardless of the reality of the situation - as soon as the right manager demands more uptime to an engineer, or otherwise they get fired because leadership demands more profit.
leonidasrup | an hour ago
If you want to try live without technology, try living in Somalia for few months. Average Somalian would change for you at any moment.
surgical_fire | 13 hours ago
I am as pro nuclear (actually pro anything not fossil fuel), but this was actually the best counter argument I came across:
cogman10 | 11 hours ago
And what's nuts is they can walk away with those profits, buy another nuclear company, and repeat the same process until the same inevitable outcome happens.
We need reform. At a minimum we need make it impossible to have things like LLCs in charge of companies where failure result in huge negative externalities. The owners need to be at risk at going bankrupt. Without that risk, they'll just keep destroying everything so long as it makes an extra buck.
belorn | 9 hours ago
If a mining company extract lead and silver from the ground, we kind of know that they won't be around to safeguard waste for all eternity, nor will they be able to restore the environment when the company eventually goes bankrupt. If society want to allow such commercial operations then it need to also strike a balance so that society don't have to bear too much of the negative externalities.
In Sweden, the goverment here owns the energy company that operate the nuclear power plants and the mining company.
ViewTrick1002 | 2 hours ago
That is not correct. Vattenfall has nothing to do with Oskarshamn, and had nothing to do with Barsebäck.
Forsmark
- Vattenfall: 66.0 %
- Mellansvensk Kraftgrupp (essentially Fortum): 25.5 %
- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 8.5 %
Ringhals
- Vattenfall: 70.44 %
- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 29.56 %
Oskarshamn
- Uniper (through Sydkraft): 54.5 %
- Fortum: 45.5 %
Barsebäck
- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 100 %
gustavus | 13 hours ago
Of course like in the well known capitalist regime of the USSR that precipitated the big nuclear problem. If only we had the government instead of the evil capitalists to run things then we could be safe from those profit maximizing parasites.
silver92bullet | 13 hours ago
leonidasrup | an hour ago
Under the current aircraft protection rules, the containment building has to survive impact of a fully loaded large civilian airplane moving at speed of sound.
For example testing of samples of containment building was done using acceleration of F-4 Phantom mounted on rocket sledge towards the wall. The wall survived the impact without problems.
belorn | 9 hours ago
The biggest reason the world is seeing more active was is that we are dependent on a few unstable countries for our energy needs. Solar and wind power can produce very cheap energy when the weather is optimal, but suboptimal weather can equally produce extremely expensive prices to the point where social and economical stability start to break down. We are giving money to warmongering oligarchs because of the fear of what happens if prices goes up to high, which would not happen if energy and heating infrastructure was secure and geopolitical independent.
defrost | 4 hours ago
Unless you accidentally left out "fossil", as in "burning fossil fuel", then we at least are unlikely to agree.
I certainly intend to continue to gather tree waste and burn it - and I cannot see a problem if forest weight is maintained through replenishment and replacement.
leonidasrup | an hour ago
For example Denmark is importing lot of wood from Baltics, UK lot of wood from Canada.
https://www.eubioenergy.com/2025/03/13/no-smoke-without-fire...
defrost | 40 minutes ago
I certainly didn't claim that there was, but thank you for rebutting a point not made.
belorn | 58 minutes ago
Burning wood has at best similar environmental impact as beef. In theory it can be produced using just "waste", but we have to extend the word "waste" beyond recognition when the profit-maximizing locusts become part of the picture. The world is suffering from deforestation.
We are not talking about using garden waste to burn a log in a open fire place, but rather grid sized power plants and central heating plants. I should however mention that there are air quality reports that points to issues with individual homes burning wood inside cities. Open air fireplaces do not scale well with high density population areas.
defrost | 41 minutes ago
Err, lets perhaps stick with
* Cutting down massive amount of old growth forest is harmful to the environment ( whether it's for burning or bauxite )
and
* Cutting down forest faster than regrowth rate is harmful to the environment (as that's net loss wrt surface sequestration)
and perhaps examine "harmful to bio diversity" (is it? checker-boarded plantation forest has about the same biodiversity as it ever has - it's not old-growth but it's not devoid of life or diversity), "dangerous to humans" (really? with modern logging machines on plantation forest? - the deaths in logging largely come from non plantation clearing on steep slopes and happen to humans aware of the risks)
> True tree waste is very minimal today
Is it? Many people hereabout heat their homes from limb lopping, dead fall, and tree deaths.
> not enough to power a nation for any duration
I don't recall suggesting powering a nation - just pointing out that there's an acceptable attrition rate for forests.
Mawr | 9 hours ago
Just like commercial aviation companies then, right?
> Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
On average or what?
> Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
What's "solar"? A solar panel? Sure. Solar+8h worth of batteries? Maybe. Solar+enough batteries to guarantee a stable grid? Hmm. Solar+batteries+the externalities of burning fossil fuels to compensate?
> Nuclear waste ...
Let me stop you right there. Head on over to https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/fifteen_minutes and look at how much coal&gas waste (no, not just CO2) we are dumping into the atmosphere at this very moment.
Now go ahead and tell me again that we need to badly find a solution to the huge problem of inert, solid, compact nuclear waste that's just sitting there.
> What if an accident happens?
Idk, what if an accident happens with anything else that's already 99.999% safe, like aviation? Odd question to ask about the objectively safest power source we have.
> Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Right. You're getting attacked by hypersonic missiles and your priority is your nuclear power plant safety.
Empirically, somehow Ukraine is not a nuclear wasteland despite their nuclear power plants being very much under threat of attack by not so sane people.
cedws | 15 hours ago
Nuclear is a great peacetime technology, Europe is no longer in peacetime.
ilumanty | 15 hours ago
declan_roberts | 15 hours ago
Regarding drones, most reactors are built relatively hardened. For example, they're protected against a 747 flying into it at full speed. So even a drone attack would take an advanced enemy, and they might as well drop a bomb on you.
cedws | 14 hours ago
Topfi | 15 hours ago
Besides maybe solar, there is always the potential for harm during war times. Heck, even with solar, cutting off electricity supply to a major urban area can tragically carry a death toll that goes beyond even the few severe power plant disasters we as a species have ever encountered.
Fission is not an outlier here and designing any power plant for resilience is a necessary step, whether in war or peacetimes, whether in a tectonically stable or seismically active area.
RandomLensman | 14 hours ago
Topfi | 14 hours ago
The main difference in nuking a fission plant over any other area would be creating longer-term fallout.
If the attacker is at all rational, unlikely to be desired because it makes the area hard to inaccessible for troops on either side.
If the attacker is horrificaly irrational and just wants to cause pure, long term, irreparable harm, unfortunately salted nukes would be a feasible option, independent of having a fission plant anywhere near the drop zone...
Nuclear disarmament, international cooperation and reliable defence alliances can (hopefully) be used to protect against this, along with resilient fission designs within reason. Not having a fission plant by itself unfortunately and targically wouldn't prevent an utterly irrational attacker willing to cause as much long term damage as possible.
Very aware of that harsh fact, living in a country that has a section in our constitution making nuclear power illegal (yes, very stupid) and is not part of any defensive alliance (while expecting the countries around us to defend us anyways), if someone wanted to "salt the earth" around Salzburg, Vienna or Graz, they could do it, even if we have no plants.
RandomLensman | 14 hours ago
newsclues | 14 hours ago
direwolf20 | 14 hours ago
0x_rs | 15 hours ago
0. https://atomicinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/LNT-and-NAS-En...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_Nuclear_Disarmame...
cowlevel | 13 hours ago
apexalpha | 15 hours ago
gedy | 14 hours ago
JuniperMesos | 13 hours ago
apexalpha | 13 hours ago
It's hard to convince people to change a stance they made a part of their political and personal identity.
penguin_booze | 6 hours ago
"Science progresses one funeral at a time".
droppedasbaby | 15 hours ago
scoofy | 14 hours ago
The large portion of the environmentalist left are degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less, which means "less energy" is actually good. It will never be a politically viable position, but again, we're talking about a party that until recently has never come close to wielding power.
hughw | 14 hours ago
scoofy | 14 hours ago
That I think it's an idiotic position is beside the point. Things and prosperity generally are not the problem, and can grow pretty much indefinitely for the foreseeable future if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.
MisterTea | 14 hours ago
There are a lot of things that would work fine if done in a reasonable and safe way but we have plenty of examples of people making unreasonable and unsafe decisions.
cowlevel | 13 hours ago
scoofy | 11 hours ago
JuniperMesos | 13 hours ago
hughw | 9 hours ago
wolvoleo | 6 hours ago
And most of these things have impact much bigger than just the climate. They pollute in a lot more ways than that. Resource extraction, manufacturing pollution, transport, waste disposal.
It's stuff like forcing repairability that allows us to do with much less impact on the environment.
ZeroGravitas | 13 hours ago
If you accept both of these then like Vaclav Smil, you'll conclude that you need to use less fossil fuels and nothing else will replace them. And if you care about fairness globally then 1st world nations need to really use less.
It all makes perfect sense if you believe all the lies told about renewables.
Most of the people mocking it helped spread those lies, which makes attacking the people who believe them a bit rude.
scoofy | 11 hours ago
Literally the leftist dense cities have been the ones pushing back hardest against high rises, sustainable transportation alternatives, and in large part, electrification through overly restrictive environmental laws designed in the 70s.
That’s over now. Climate change is here, and you still can’t convert a house to a duplex in LA without jumping through a thousand hoops.
worik | 14 hours ago
The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia and the reason? Our current consumption
Such greed and disregard for following generations
Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
apexalpha | 14 hours ago
worik | 11 hours ago
Nuclear: hundreds
devilsdata | 14 hours ago
That said solar panels and batteries are so bloody good now, why even bother building nuclear reactors in much of the world? And geothermal looks promising too, with the new fracking tech they're using. But who knows.
anakaine | 14 hours ago
devilsdata | 10 hours ago
https://www.legislation.qld.gov.au/view/whole/html/inforce/c...
And of course have a chat with the traditional custodians of the land, and see if they're keen.
defrost | 3 hours ago
nomel | 14 hours ago
AngryData | 13 hours ago
JuniperMesos | 13 hours ago
AnnikaL | 3 hours ago
defrost | 2 hours ago
( eg: Noonkanbah - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/sep/30/the-d... )
They do make agreements and keep them when they are part of the discussion from the outset and consulted for advice.
ie: find a place to make a hole that is both stable and not a significant site.
It doesn't help that more recent good faith agreements have been torpedoed by, say, Rio Tinto not keeping their word going forward.
( in recent follow up news from an epic Rio FUBAR - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-25/juukan-gorge-archaeol... )
knodi123 | 14 hours ago
Don't let perfection be the enemy of improvement.
opo | 14 hours ago
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
No one knows what the best and worst case scenarios for deaths during to climate change as they effects might include AMOC shutdown, sea level rise, forced mass migrations of people, wars, shortages of food, etc. In all credible scenarios the deaths and suffering in even the best case scenarios will be much, much, higher than any deaths due to radiation exposure from nuclear waste.
hermitcrab | 14 hours ago
Yes there is, bury it. Its what we do with lots of other waste. Of course, you have to be a bit more careful than you would be with a standard landfill. But the engineering is well understood. It is usually just the fact that nobody wants it buried near them that causes political issues.
>The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia
Pumping more carbon into the atmosphere is also a huge burden for future generations.
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
What do you base that on?
worik | 11 hours ago
We have no way to communicate the danger of the waste to people 55,000 years in the future
That greed, yours and mine, could create that dangerous pile of rubbish, that will be deadly to people who will never know of our existence
What astounding recklessness and hostility to the future
For current consumption
Unbelievable
kalessin | 14 hours ago
Nuclear waste is great for several reasons:
- the first one is quantity: very small in comparison with how much energy it produced (a nuclear reaction generates one million times more energy than a chemical reaction so less resource usage across the whole lifecycle);
- the second one is that most of it (over 90%) can be recycled and used with gen 4 reactors;
- the third one is that it stays local, i.e. unlike CO2 it doesn't go into the atmosphere (and then the ocean), and since CO2 is inert, from a human time scale how long CO2 can stay in the atmosphere is, I would argue, comparable to nuclear waste decay.
worik | 11 hours ago
You cannot predict t that any place on Earth will be stable, or stay local, over hundredsof millenia
Wishful thinking so you can make future generations pay for your consumption
apexalpha | 14 hours ago
The leader of Germany that phased out nuclear and made Germany fully reliant on Russia then took a job... at Gazprom. The VP from the Greens responsible took a very high paying job lobbying for foreign Gas firms, too.
It has to be one of the most successful foreign influencing campaigns in history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der#Business... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joschka_Fischer#Business_activ...
RandomLensman | 14 hours ago
apexalpha | 14 hours ago
The chances of a Soviet leadership-induced meltdown like at a German nuclear reactor that is properly designed and maintained is laughable.
It is, however, extremely hard to film the slow killing of people by browncoal. It's easy to film a nuclear reactor incident.
RandomLensman | 14 hours ago
ZeroGravitas | 13 hours ago
A slightly racist belief in the Japanese as superior at following the rules meant a big shock when the Germans realised that even the Japanese could not be trusted with nuclear power.
knodi123 | 14 hours ago
Sure, you and I can talk about newer plant designs that fail safely, or about how coal plants emit more radiation by far. But if we had the ability to rapidly convince large swathes of the populace of provable scientific facts, then clean power is only one of the many many problems we would be able to solve.
sampo | 14 hours ago
Part of it was a Soviet psyop to get Western citizens to oppose West's nuclear weapons. Encourage people to oppose nuclear in general, both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
Arodex | 13 hours ago
UltraSane | 13 hours ago
cowlevel | 13 hours ago
UltraSane | 13 hours ago
cowlevel | 13 hours ago
UltraSane | 10 hours ago
cowlevel | 5 hours ago
UltraSane | 4 hours ago
Arodex | 11 hours ago
Thanks to the inherent safety of nuclear? Or that the wind was, by chance, blowing to the sea when the worst happened?
https://www.ianfairlie.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/fukush...
https://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/wp-content/upload/2011/...
And who cares about the 150 000 displaced people and the still existing exclusion zone?
Oh, yeah, because the Fukushima nuclear accident is still ongoing. The plant is still too dangerous to access and dismantle. Cooling water is still pumped into the reactors to keep them from melting down. That water is still contaminated by a mixture of radioelements and being released to the ocean after partial treatment. And this will go on for several decades still.
UltraSane | 10 hours ago
leonidasrup | 13 hours ago
For example Greenpeace had it roots in the oposition to nuclear weapon testing at the end of 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace
tasuki | 13 hours ago
lincon127 | 14 hours ago
You got one guy on here claiming a fusion reactor will be built in Virginia (lol). Yet another claiming that the reason that everyone hates nuclear power is because of the byproduct of nuclear waste and that it's worse than climate change (rofl). Like what kind of drugs are you people on?
Gibbon1 | 14 hours ago
Nuclear loses on pure accounting and time to build.
93po | 14 hours ago
Gibbon1 | 13 hours ago
So for the same rate of investment you can decarbonize 2-3 times faster. And that doesn't figure the long lead times for nuclear vs solar, wind and batteries.
dumberquestions | 14 hours ago
Arodex | 13 hours ago
UltraSane | 13 hours ago
adammarples | 13 hours ago
jayflux | 13 hours ago
https://storelectric.com/dunkelflaute-energy-storage/
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/677bc80399c93...
UltraSane | 13 hours ago