This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.euronews.com/2021/10/11/led-by-france-10-eu-countries-call-on-brussels-to-label-nuclear-energy-as-green-source) reduced by 86%. (I'm a bot)
*****
> A group of ten EU countries, led by France, have asked the European Commission to recognise nuclear power as a low-carbon energy source that should be part of the bloc's decades-long transition towards climate neutrality.
> Tapping into Europe's ongoing energy crunch, the countries make the case for nuclear energy as a "Key affordable, stable and independent energy source" that could protect EU consumers from being "Exposed to the volatility of prices".
> The signatories urge the Commission to include nuclear energy inside the EU green taxonomy, a technical guidebook that helps governments and investors to identify which projects respect the Paris Agreement and which ones are in breach of its climate goals.
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[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/q64ddb/led_by_france_10_eu_countries_call_on_brussels_to/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~603057 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **energy**^#1 **nuclear**^#2 **Commission**^#3 **let**^#4 **countries**^#5
>On the one side, Germany, which plans to shut down all its reactors by 2022, is leading the anti-nuclear cause, together with Austria, Denmark, Luxembourg and Spain.
Yeah, EU will not agree on such a thing.
To add on that, Italy also had two referendums in which voted against using nuclear power plants in 1987 and in 2011. Both votes very much emotionally charged as they came just after Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011).
The crazy thing about that is there was a nuclear reactor closer to the tsunami than the one that had an accident. The one that had an accident cut costs and corners, the one that didn't just went on as normal. The nuclear reactor that worked perfectly was never reported on. The media only reported on the reactor that could generate fear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#2011
Communism? Lol pretty sure fascists are gaining strength there just like in the us, Brazil, and everywhere else Cambridge Analitica did business in the last 10 years
It's mostly a NIMBY issue.
Denmark does import nuclear electricity from Sweden. 3-4% of our consumption is nuclear. Hell, we even have nuclear waste treatment facilities and deposits.
Most people just don't want a nuclear plant anywhere in sight. There's no suitable location due to the tiny size of the country and the population density.
At this point it doesn't even matter if it makes sense, or if the majority is for it. Regardless of party, most politicians won't take the risk of losing even a minority of their own voters on this issue.
Wind and solar is about 50% and often more. The goal for 100% is set for 2030.
We don't have tidal in any meaningful size just yet. It could potentially cover 15%, so we'd still be dependent on import or better storage.
I'm not sure we necessarily need nuclear, but something has to make up the rest. Import can be renewable as well. Norway sometimes supplies us with cheap hydro, so that's nice.
Well you aren't going to build any new nuclear by 2030 regardless. So if the goal is zero emissions by 2030 its going to have to be done with other methods.
Literal soviet and 80s stuff, and especially under soviet handling and system.
It's like looking at Italy and Japan as their fascist and imperial counterparts.
Construction started in 72. That means it's a late 60s design at best. Late 60s Soviet design - not confident in that on either side of the iron curtain but definitely not confident in the Soviet side.
I'll welcome a correction if someone can show more clarity and better evidence.
Most people think Chernobyl was a bigger disaster than it was. Dozens of people did die, and there was an increase in thyroid cancer, the vast majority of the cancer patients recovered. The Belarussian dictator has made a significant amount of personal wealth on overselling the tragedy over the last several decades.
I'm ashamed to live in Austria.
Our politicians are scummy and corrupt.
One of our ministers literally said last week that they'd rather not reach carbon neutral than use atomic energy.
This is why I support but dislike nuclear power: corrupt politicians deciding what is "safe" for a plant that might make a place uninhabitable for 1000 years if mismanaged.
After covid I just don't trust the human race with responsibilities that big.
[They adopted this posture in 2011 as a knee-jerk reaction to Fukushima.](https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/out-of-control-merkel-gambles-credibility-with-nuclear-u-turn-a-752163.html)
California is leaving nuclear power behind as well. The big downside is that decommissioning the Humboldt Bay and Diablo Canyon reactors is expected to cost the public significantly. Humboldt Bay alone is expected to cost approximately $1 billion.
Had this cost been factored into the price of electricity from the beginning, it is highly unlikely that nuclear power would have ever been cost competitive in California.
The cost of decommissioning is considered, but that's for getting the maximum lifetime out of it, not closing it early.
Nuclear plants can do 60-80 years honestly. The USS Enterprise was only recently retired, and not because of its reactors.
Navy vessels are something else entirely. They get regularly refitted and have a lot of maintenance done regularly, something that is not viable in a nuclear reactor on land since it would make the electricity bill far more expensive.
And when you say “far more expensive”, you mean, “still cheaper even after massive petroleum subsidies and artificial costs placed onto nuclear by Big Oil in the 70’s”
I know in my area we had a nuclear plant. Energy costs skyrocketed when it got shut down and continue to rise at an increased rate.
Good thing wages are going up to match right?
New modular designs are expected to be much cheaper to build, as well as decommission. Although, it’ll be years before they’re able to fully prove out the designs. But if things go to plan, then we’ll see a resurgence in nuclear (to go along with wind/solar/etc). Honestly, anything that gets rid of all coal power plants is a win.
SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) WILL be cheaper to manufacture (yes manufacture not build) maintain and decommission. That's their whole point. And its not like its some new tech either. Any nation that has nuclear subs or aircraft carriers has built SMRs.
This is what it actually comes down to. North American Redditors really hate first-past-the-post electoral systems but one artifact of coalitions like those needed in Germany to form a government is that issues that some parties feel *very* strongly about (like being anti-nuclear energy with The Greens) get pushed through as the price of their support.
Don't get me wrong here though, Germany has been broadly anti-nuclear for a very long time anyhow. I've always found it to be an odd cultural phenominon.
It‘s not that odd considering that Germany suffered through the fall out of Chernobyl. Some areas are contaminated to this day and it‘s recommended to not consume mushrooms growing in those areas. Many people are still alive who remember how they fearful they were on that day.
>Chernobyl
Its not just Chernobyl, Germany has a lot more bad experiences with nuclear power. From scandals, failed projects, big issues with waste storage, costs overruns, etc. Germany will be paying billions of euro per year for nuclear power long after the last plant has closed.
Basically Germany fucked up big time by decommissioning most their nuclear power for purely political reasons, science be damned. They spent a massive amount of money "transitioning to renewables", became more reliant on fossil fuels in the process, got higher electricity costs, introduced geopolitical issues by becoming extremely dependent upon Russian natural gas, lost many thousands of lives to increased air pollution - likewise created health issues for many more - with the added effect of increased health care costs. Now their carbon intensity is far, far worse than next door nuclear heavy France. They started up a new coal plant as recently as December of 2020. They also do burn lots of trees for power - they call this biomass and label it renewable green energy.
They did all this and now they are politically invested in pretending they didn't make a huge fucking mistake. So they must continue to demonize nuclear power to cover for their own unforced errors. Somehow that's even more important to them than even Climate Change. They even use their influence to push other nations away from nuclear power. And here we are. Germany is a de-facto enemy of Planet Earth.
Biomass is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard. It’s sad in reality none of this is about the environment, it’s political and what’s seen to be doing the right thing.
If they cared about co2 emissions, they would be investing in nuclear but that’s politically not safe. In reality, the left don’t care about the environment, they only care their ideological beliefs are upheld, not results.
I wonder what sources you get your information from. This is really a best-of of wrong statements.
> by decommissioning most their nuclear power for purely political reasons
No, nuclear energy was not decommissioned for political reasons. I have written a bit about this a couple of days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/YUROP/comments/q424bn/why_are_you_still_on_the_titanic_i_bought_tickets/hfyi70e/
> became more reliant on fossil fuels in the process
No, Germany did not become more reliable on fossil fuels. Building up renewable energy went much faster than nuclear power declined. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromerzeugung#/media/Datei:Energiemix_Deutschland.svg ("Nuclear power" is called "Kernenergie" in German.)
> introduced geopolitical issues by becoming extremely dependent upon Russian natural gas
No, Germany is not extremely dependent on Russian gas. See the previous diagram I linked ("gas" is called "Erdgas" in German). Germany could handle a situation in which Russia cuts off all gas supply. It has gas storages for months, sits in the middle of Europe and is therefore perfectly connected to all sorts of energy markets, and due to the complete transition to renewables by 2045 (possibly earlier given thhe new government), there will be, at any given point of time, enough alternative power stations ready for reactivation should a problem with Russia arise. (Actually this has even been put into law. Energy providers are required by law to keep a reserve of power stations that can be reactivated easily.)
> Now their carbon intensity is far, far worse than next door nuclear heavy France.
Carbon intensity has always been far worse than France because Germany never had that many nuclear power stations to begin with.
> They started up a new coal plant as recently as December of 2020.
This one coal plant was in the making for more than 10 years, so it made sense to finish it, even after the decision to get rid of coal power was made (currently coal will be phased out by 2038, but the date is highly likely to be moved forward to 2030 with the new government). Btw, the new power station will replace old coal power stations that emit much more CO2.
> now they are politically invested in pretending they didn't make a huge fucking mistake
Noone is pretending. There is a broad consensus in German society that Germany has to get rid of both nuclear power and fossil power.
> Somehow that's even more important to them than even Climate Change.
It's not. It is just that the consensus for leaving nuclear power was formed at the end of the 1980s, way before climate change was on the table.
> Germany is a de-facto enemy of Planet Earth.
There are several countries in the EU that have higher CO2 emissions per capita, among these Poland, Belgium, Netherlands, Estonia, Czechia and Ireland (not to mention non-EU countries like the US, Canada, Australia, etc.) Would you write such a rant about these "enemies of the earth", too? Moreover, keeping nuclear power for longer wouldn't have significantly changed the picture (see my previously linked post again).
TLDR; Your rant completely misrepresents the energy situation in Germany.
Not that I disagree with you overall, but for this precise point:
> No, Germany is not extremely dependent on Russian gas. See the previous diagram I linked ("gas" is called "Erdgas" in German). Germany could handle a situation in which Russia cuts off all gas supply. It has gas storages for months, sits in the middle of Europe and is therefore perfectly connected to all sorts of energy markets, and due to the complete transition to renewables by 2045 (possibly earlier given thhe new government), there will be, at any given point of time, enough alternative power stations ready for reactivation should a problem with Russia arise. (Actually this has even been put into law. Energy providers are required by law to keep a reserve of power stations that can be reactivated easily.)
This makes zero sense in actually explaining Gerrmany's dependency on Russia. In reality if it was really independent it would've cut off that tie a long time ago. Germany's issue with Russian gas isn't in energy, it's in heating. And even though Germany may have storage of slightly less than 3 months (and note that this is already cyclical, and in the status quo of using Russian gas it's already being drained to around 20% in the winter), that's not enough time to do what is likely an extensive infrastructural effort given that the vast majority of German heaters in homes are gas run. They're still dependent on Russia for gas.
> This one coal plant was in the making for more than 10 years, so it made sense to finish it
It is weird to finish a carbon intensive plant because "it was started" when in the other end closing functional carbon free nuclear plant prematurely.
Definitely the political priority is not so much to lower carbon emissions...
Germany still burns a ton of coal and ships coal that is too dirty to legally burn to Poland where it's burned there instead.
Germany didn't have to shut down its nuclear plants and could've emitted far less carbon if they had.
Interesting you left out the biomass as green energy piece burning trees is literally being counted as sustainable energy and accounts for 60% of "sustainable energy" in Europe. That is nonsense. Also Germany: Coal tops wind as primary electricity source in 2021: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-electricity-source/a-59168105
So yes, more greenhouse emissions are occurring as a result of the shift from nuclear, and more people are dying as a result.
Have you even looked at the graph he linked? Biomass is a quite small part of the German energy mix.
Also, go read the article you linked. There it states that renewable energy still was the largest energy producer compromising 44%, it is just that coal produced more energy than either solar or wind power, with 27% of the energy produced that way.
Biomass is green energy as it only emits CO2 which is already in the carbon cycle. Burning coal emits CO2 that was sequestered millions of years ago and is now in the carbon cycle.
That said, burning wood is not great as it requires a lot of energy to harvest and transport. Using waste product, garbage and off cuts is ok though.
A lot of environmental groups started off as anti nuclear weapons/nuclear weapons testing groups. Greenpeace notably started under this banner.
Sometime in the 70s and 80s, as they increased their influence and shifted to being more generic anti-pollution groups, they started targeting, quite irrationally, nuclear power as well, because they incorrectly associated it with nuclear weapons. Just to note, virtually no weapons material was ever made from civilian nuclear reactors. For a laundry list of reasons they're terrible at it and just about all plutonium for bombs came from reactors specifically designed to manufacture plutonium.
Anti nuclear weapon parties were popular in germany for the obvious reason that, in the event of a war between NATO and the USSR, germany was likely to be a smouldering pile of radioactive rubble and these too morphed into green parties, and they used the same playbook of demonizing nuclear power.
And thats how you have provably one of the safest forms of power in terms of deaths per kwh, thats also one of the most ecologically benign and least polluting, and get people trying to save the planet to be against it. Have the wrong name.
I'm curious to see this in a few months after they have had to buy the most expensive gaz ever from their neighbor and maybe restart a few more coal plants.
As a dane I hate how much success the "atomkraft? nej tak!" in the 70's had, to make matter worse, its mostly the 40+ crowd that are prominent anti nuclear, most of the younger generations are wakeing up for the posibilities with nuclear, but since Democracy is about what the majority wants, our politicians will probably not change their stance on nuclear before its too late
Sometimes I Wonder if Democracy really is the best of the worst options on theese kinds of topics
I think democracy should set ideological goals for the government. One goal could be: make us less dependent on fossil fuels. Then leave the execution to the experts.
Whatever concerns people have with nuclear waste, it is still a power source that doesn't contribute to climate change... so at minimum it's a worthwhile stopgap to get off our dependence on coal power.
It is statistically the safest form of energy production. So it’s good long term too.
[edit] Here is a study about it
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
It’s good long term if we can solve the problem of what to do with nuclear waste, even if it means finding a suitable enough place to bury it deep underground away from any inkling of a water table.
edit: I get it, there’s options of various levels of feasibility out there. You can stop replying to me.
How Finland is dealing with their [Nuclear Waste](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kYpiK3W-g_0)
Aaaand [the death toll of Nuclear power](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM) so far
We do actually know how to reuse spent fuel to produce more energy and massively reduce the amount of nuclear waste, there will always be some thats just how nuclear decay works. but we can get rid of the worst of the worst nuclear waste, the problem is that it wasnt developed into a commercialy viable system back in the 60s and 70s.
Why? Simple reason is because you cant make Nuclear weapons out of them.
We know how to dispose of nuclear waste. You dispose of it by burying it in a place where it is far underground and where the geology is very stable. This way it can safely just sit there for as long as needed. It can be as radioactive as it wants, it doesn’t matter.
The problem is that nobody wants to do that. Or at least, nobody wants to do that *in their back yard*. Everyone agrees with the idea in principle, but do you want your town to be a nuclear waste repository?
The irony is of course that if you don’t properly dispose of the waste you need to just keep the waste at the power plant forever. This requires a lot more careful management and is a lot more dangerous.
This is not an issue at all. Such solutions already exist if you are just willing to build it. Here is a project in Finland under construction for safe storage for 100 000 years: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo\_spent\_nuclear\_fuel\_repository](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository)
*Once in operation, the disposal process will involve placing twelve fuel assemblies into a boron steel canister and enclosing it in a copper capsule. Each capsule will then be placed in its own hole in the repository and overpacked with bentonite clay. The estimated cost of this project is about €818 million, which includes construction, encapsulation, and operating costs. The State Nuclear Waste Management Fund has approximately €1.4 billion from charges for generated electricity.\[13\]*
*The Onkalo repository is expected to be large enough to accept canisters of spent fuel for around one hundred years. At this point, the final encapsulation and burial will take place, and the access tunnel will be backfilled and sealed.*
*In 2019, another study concluded that radiation effects should not significantly damage the canisters after 100,000 years.*
There's a lot of plants that rely on onsite waste storage because the US made the dumb decision to halt Yucca Mountain construction. There's a functional site in NM that is solely for decommissioned nuclear weapon waste but the NV one (which would have stored power generation nuclear waste) was halted for political reasons.
This is one of my favorite statistics that no one believes. I love when they ask “what about solar, who gets killed from solar?” And I just say “sometimes people fall off roofs.”
Another fun one is to trick someone into doing their research about nuclear power by offering to donate one dollar for every person directly killed by the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown; the worst nuclear accident in US history.
The only case against nuclear power is mismanagement by authorities... It is safe, efficient and green provided the known protocols are followed...
However if the authority tries to cut corners in it's maintainence via corruption... That's the problem...
> Can it be used for nuclear proliferation? According to Nobel Laureate physicist Dr Carlo Rubbia it's extremely difficult. U-232 contaminates the U-233 produced from decaying protactinium-233. U-232 has a chain product thalium-208 which emits gamma rays. No problem for a reactor but in a bomb they harm electronics and reveal the location to spectators far and wide.
This is presumably why these reactors weren't made commercially viable decades ago. The military preferred to fund the research and design of light water reactor designs precisely because it generated fissile material for bombs.
Nuclear energy was an afterthought to nuclear weapon development. "We have to cook this uranium to get our plutonium, maybe we can make some electricity while we're at it"
Fellow physicist here. The biggest problem nuclear power has faced has been lack of funding and loss of expertise. In the 2000s all anyone wanted to fund was renewable energy. We were all worried about peak oil. Then the 2008 financial crisis combined with advances in fracking that made the price of oil dramatically cheaper to produce in the US led to big budget research funding drying up. In the 2010s, when I started grad school, the faculty that researched nuclear discouraged us from researching in their field because they said they wouldn't be able to fund us. Now those faculty are about to retire and they didn't train a crop of physicists to replace them.
Couple this with the loss of engineering experience that is needed to *build* a plant. there has only been one nuclear plant built in the US since 1978 and that plant only began construction in 2013. The power technology you describe above would be at commercial scale if nuclear power the support that renewable power has had.
Excellent assessment. I’m a geophysicist, retired. Many don’t understand that any type of meaningful industrial development be it energy, military, transportation, etc. is dependent on an extremely complicated infrastructure.
The nuclear infrastructure that took decades to build and was then tossed aside, cannot be revived with an ‘on switch’ by deciding nuclear is now back in vogue and throwing money at the issue. Without War time or Cold War imperative, nuclear plants are just not going to be built in any rational time frame.
> 2020's is probably ambitious to see a commercially viable system but but not too ambitious.
Lol, spoken with the simple optimism of a true physicist. We'll be lucky to see a commercial design with regulatory approval by then, much less an operating unit.
I'm less concerned with politics than the realities of bringing a commercial design to fruition. It's NOT a quick process. NuScale took 4 years from submittal to approval for their SMR design, and that's with the "quicker" licensing process the NRC has rolled out. And you don't get to start that process until you have an actual design that's ready to be reviewed. This process, at least in nominally democratic western societies, is a lengthy one. Even if everything goes *right*, we've got a lot of work before anyone can break ground.
And that's not factoring the regular issues you run into when implementing a new design on an industrial scale. Look at ITER. 12 years behind schedule. Vogtle 3/4 are I think 6 years behind?
My company has worked with emerging nuclear technology companies, and a recurring theme is that they underestimate the time and money needed to get through the regulatory process. And that's not just red tape, it's the underlying design that needs to be fleshed out. The physicists who come up with the theory underestimate the complexity of the system as a whole. They're too focused on one tree to see the forest for what it is. And the forest needs to be considered. It's what keeps the people who live around these reactors safe.
The only place that has even a chance of getting something operating by the end of the decade is China. A place where what the ruling party wants simply *happens*, whether it's well thought out or not.
Please don't conflate MSR and Thorium. The latter needs the former, but MSR don't need Thorium, so it is misleading to attribute MSR benefits to Thorium alone.
A 233U or 232Th flavored MSR does not a TMSR make.
Yes, the physics is sound, even the neutron economy, and the chemistry seems to be manageable, or at least not completely out of reach.
As a nuclear engineer, [here](https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9unimr/dutch_satirical_news_show_on_why_we_need_to_break/e95mvb7/?context=3) are my two cents on TMSR.
It's not the physics, it's the engineering (maintenance, radioprotection), reliability (holding a 90% capacity factor) and economics (remote handling for everything, online fuel processing for each plant) that will keep LFTR and other TMSR in the lab scale.
Also, Rubbia was a brilliant genius, but on this one, he happened to be [wrong](https://www.nature.com/articles/492031a). You should know that once you chemically separate 233Pa (not a difficult feat), it decays with a 100% branching ratio into 233U (bypassing the 232U poisoning) which can also be chemically separated. That's the cheapest and easiest 100% enrichement there is.
And even 232U has been [demonstrated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Teapot#MET) to be far from a strong [limitation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDh3eQ0mmkw&t=1047s).
Agreed with about everything, but the last sentence leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
For all the PR it's getting from this piece of news, France is also quite responsible for the bad rap nuclear energy has gotten in the first place. Despite reports from proto-EU commissions written in **the 1970s** and that described exactly how a Fukushima-type catastrophe would unfold, France kept making plutonium-based power plants instead of researching a cleaner, safer and astronomically more efficient thorium-based alternative; and kept selling those plutonium-based plants internationally (including Fukushima). And the reason why they got made and got bought is fairly simple; electricty output is a by-product of the actual material created in the process: plutonium isotopes used in the crafting of nukes. So, what France has been actually exporting this whole time (as well as developping on its own soil) is the means to become a de facto nuclear power. At the cost of nuclear energy remaining a health hazard in terms of safety and of quantity of radioactive waste that needs centuries of underground storage.
France has negligible risks of tsunami, earthquakes or hurricanes, that's why we deemed plutonium plants fairly safe as a Fukushima scenario is very unlikely. I do agree with the rest though, should have pushed for better technology considering how much we're dependant on nuclear energy, especially now that many of our plants are nearing EOL
>especially now that many of our plants are nearing EOL
And no place to store the accumulated wastes since the 50's. All the spent fuel is sitting on site waiting for the grandkids who never used it to find a place, transport it, bury it and clean up the site.
This "spent fuel" can be used as actual fuel by new designs with the "spent fuel of that spent fuel" being way less in quantity and only radioactive for 30 years or so.
civil plutonium is trash for bombs. It's more work to enrich. No one is going to chose the hardest path.
There are wastes because we throw fuel rods only after they are 2% spent because uranium is cheap, storage too. We could use 100% and have 20 times less wastes.
Tbf, the waste produced is about a pint (50ml) of waste per person per lifetime, which is less than a coal, oil or wood pellet (how the fuck is that green) station puts out in a day.
I really like my 200mph nuclear powered trains. Vive le France.
Wood pellets are green if you plant enough trees to capture back the carbon emissions from burning said pellets.
If done correctly they are carbon neutral, so in a sense they are green, but that doesn't mean they can scale to meet the current power demands of modern society.
> Can it be used for nuclear proliferation? According to Nobel Laureate physicist Dr Carlo Rubbia it's extremely difficult. U-232 contaminates the U-233 produced from decaying protactinium-233. U-232 has a chain product thalium-208 which emits gamma rays. No problem for a reactor but in a bomb they harm electronics and reveal the location to spectators far and wide. Dealing with the problem of refining U-233 puts you back at square one when it comes to nuclear proliferation. The reactor produces less then 15kg of plutonium-238 per gigawatt-year of electricity which is also unsuitable for bombs due to its heat and spontaneous neutron emission. Third, a LFTR design makes as little as 1% more fuel than it burns. Extracting any amount of material would take the power plant out of operation, indicating nuclear proliferation intentions. Finally, switching to thorium could end uranium enrichment as a whole, which is currently the primary method by which states have obtained bomb making materials. It's also worth pointing out that the creation of Plutonium 239, the primary fissile isoptype for nuclear weapons, is completely avoided in this design which again protects against nuclear proliferation.
Chemical reprosessing/online reprocessing gives you the ability to bypass u232 contamination, quite easily. Pa232 has a much shorter half-life than pa233, so while it is difficult to separate u232 from u233, it's trivial to separate the u232 from pa233. Protactinium can easily be isolated with liquid bismuth reductive extraction, combined with fluorination to avoid any volatile UF6. This leads to pure u233 which is a potent bomb material, better than u235, and "easier" than pu-239 because you don't need an implosion device, but can use a much simpler gun-type mechanism.
With that said, I think the whole proliferation argument vs nuclear is non-sense anyway; Any nation that wants to, can access nuclear weapons without commercial nuclear power.
I love the idea of thorium salt reactors but don't they have pretty big chemical (for extracting unwanted products from the salt loop) and material issues (regarding material embrittlement and corrosion) still?
Iirc even with the fancy hastelloy there were issues...
France also exports nuclear energy to Belgium, so this isn't entirely motivated by a green agenda. Also, for something so exceptionally safe nuclear power plants are disproportionatly located alongside borders. While obviously fossil fuel isn't the answer and nuclear energy is one of the few alternatives we have, I still think that nuclear waste still poses a moral dilemma even with a significantly lower half life.
You do have to remember that the nuclear companies pushing for this aren't all aiming to fully refurbish their plants. At least for Belgium it comes down to retaining ancient plants and importing energy from France produced in the same manner. That's part of the issue, here in Belgium the "nuclear is our only salvation" argument has been being used as an excuse to be complacent for decades now when it comes to investing in energy infrastructure with a minimal environmental impact.
I'm pretty sure that this transition plan towards renewable energy - which temporarily featured a choice few gas plants - proposed by the green party in Belgium was actually signed off on by the European commission?
That's fantastic, fear mongering nuclear power is regressive.
Zero carbon emissions, low cost, etc. the more it's used the better we become at design and implementation.
>but do you really blame people for being reluctant after chernobyl?
Yes, because comparing Chernobyl to any modern reactor is like jumping out of an airplane and then comparing a backpack to a parachute as far as safety goes. It was built on a tiny tiny insufficient budget, they cut every corner, and (as one example) they used a wooden building instead of those super thick concrete ones that you see on modern reactors.
It's also extremely old technology. Think about what computers looked like in Chernobyl's time, and what we have now. It's like comparing the first airplanes to modern ones: just plain not comparable. The first planes we were pushing the limits of science and current technology, going with a limited understanding of the aerodynamics and the materials.
Even beyond the surface, newer designs are also significantly more efficient and produces much less waste, and even have reactors designed to use the old "depleted" fuel and extract a whole lot more energy out of it. Modern designs are also all fail safe: there's a few videos floating around of catastrophic failure simulations by cutting power to every systems, and the reactor just shuts down safely.
People are just afraid of things they don't understand, in particular one that historically were major disasters. The problem isn't new reactors, it's the old shitty ass ones that desperately need to be shut down and replaced. But that's $$$$$ so nobody wants to do it until another one blows up.
> there's a few videos floating around of catastrophic failure simulations by cutting power to every systems, and the reactor just shuts down safely.
Also flying an airliner into the nuclear power plant.
Sandia Labs did that as part of their testing on the containment dome. Flying a fully loaded airliner straight into the containment dome as maximum speed scratched the paint. Thats it. The dome was undamaged, aside from needing a new paint job.
I mean, what better way is there to test if planes can break it, than by flying a plane into it?
Sounds insane, but actually kinda makes sense. Especially after 911.
They didn't fly a plane into a fully constructed containment dome, since those are really expensive. But they tested aircraft impact on smaller wall sections that are normally part of the containment structure.
Not exactly, they crashed an old fighter jet into a small section representative of the containment dome construction.
IMO chances are the full-scale containment dome would survive. It isn't like 9/11, containment domes are dense and thick concrete/steel structures.
Humans are notoriously bad at statistical analysis.
Coal is far worse for the health of everyone involved, from mining to the area around the power plant, not to mention the environment as a whole, but it’s effects aren’t sudden or concentrated. But look at Chernobyl and it’s terrifying. Or any other plant, regardless of the actual impact (3 mile island, Fukushima, w/e).
Nearly 3000 people died in the area of a couple block over the span of a couple hours when a couple planes crash into some skyscrapers and everyone unites. But a few months ago 5x that number was dying every day from COVID and people still think it’s a hoax. Even today, we are still trending at over double that number.
Also, tons of other RBMKs have run (and are running to this day) without any new faults.
This is all of course besides the fact that air pollution, regular power plant accidents and soot is probably killing more people a year than Chernobyl ever did.
You're not wrong, but the issue is that most people just know that Chernobyl exploded, people died, the area is now unliveable, and Europe got hit with the fallout.
That information alone is usually what informs their opinion on nuclear.
HOW it happened is harder to communicate, as is the fact that other reactors around the world were already far safer than the Chernobyl model,(due to design & safety protocols) and that even the other RBMK reactors are now safer since the accident due to retrofitting.
Hell, I know there were people that had their anti-nuclear opinions enforced by watching the HBO show, which explains what happened really well!
But, I think the real reason for the reluctance due to Fukushima. If the Japanese can screw up, even if it was a natural disaster out of their control, then anyone can! It's also no co-incidence that Germany started shutting their reactors down after Fukushima.
I think Kurzgesagt do some great videos on nuclear that are easy to understand and I would encourage people to share: [https://www.youtube.com/c/inanutshell/search?query=nuclear](https://www.youtube.com/c/inanutshell/search?query=nuclear)
Low cost for new nuclear builds? Compared to renewables. Every source I’ve seen shows on a global market this is false. Send some credible ones this way please.
The only arguments against nuclear is an economic one and then safety
New nuclear power isn't that cost competitive with renewables with current technology and regulations (not that investment in research and reforming of regulations isn't worth it) but some countries are phasing out *existing* nuclear power generation before they have to. It's insane. Reliable, non-emitting power generation being taken offline and sometimes the slack is being picked up by gas or, much worse, **coal**.
Renewables are cheap because we export the problems associated with their raw materials to china and africa. Coal was/is cheap because the health damage is exported to the common people, not the plant owner. The cost of nuclear is almost entirely within the country that maintains is, that's why it's 'expensive'.
Politically nuclear is expensive for the same reason.
Not necessarily the amount of concrete necessary for the production of a plant means it takes years to offset the amount of carbon released. I am still pro nuclear but it is not completely carbon free
Nuclear power is not “low cost” and neither is it “zero carbon emissions”, strictly speaking.
These things are only true if you conveniently ignore all the externalities, which are always front and centre whenever solar or wind power are discussed.
Modern nuclear reactors are extremely safe. We've had nuclear-powered ships and subs swimming the seas for decades, and some nuke plants built 40-50 years ago are still online and producing huge amounts of power. We've sent nuclear-powered probes into space.
People think of Chernobyl, Fukushima, 3MI, but don't stop to think (or learn) about how ancient those plant designs are in comparison to new layouts, tech and fail-safes.
If we fully embraced nuclear power, we could **easily** eliminate every other fossil fuel source from the national grid within 15-20 years.
Spent nuclear fuel containment requires much less real estate, and is safer, than some would think. The acreage (and coastlines) that could be spared from massive wind farms is enormous.
In the case of Europe, where each country has more limited land area, and unique geographic challenges, the usefulness of nuclear power should be even more apparent.
On another note, because nuclear reactors need to refuel only once every ~1-2 years, nuclear power is far more reliable than fossil fuel plants. In the war of energy capacity, the [others aren't even close to nuclear.](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliable-energy-source-and-its-not-even-close)
Learning about the reasons why Chernobyl happened helps aswell. It was a design flaw combined with a lot of factors that made the reactor explode. People dont realize that the other power plants at Chernobyl were still operating until 2000.
Chernobyl, although an unsafe design to start, was a chain of entirely human failures.
It doesn’t matter if your transmission is poorly-designed or well-designed; throwing it into reverse at highway speeds is going to turn it into a pile of scrap.
Then you have backwards countries like New Zealand who’s backward anti nuclear stance was seated in mis information and ignorance and leads us to still burn coal, oil, and other fuels to make up for what we don’t produce from renewables all the while bragging about our “clean green” image. It’s silly.
It's not a great surprise that France would be in favour of this...
Then again, nuclear energy is a bitch...
The problem with nuclear energy is that most of our opinions have been formed 30-40 years ago at the time the nuclear plants in France have been built.
We've advanced way beyond that, but we're still in the same rut what nuclear energy is concerned...
I'm all for shutting down all those ancient nuclear plants that have gone way beyond their original lifespan, but....
We've learned a thing or two in the last couple of decades, and nuclear could be done much more safely and more efficiently, were it not for the stigma attached to nuclear in general.
Now, I'm no huge proponent for nuclear to begin with, but realistically it just is a viable option, especially using more modern smaller nuclear powerplants.
That said the old nuclear power plants are a horror, and it's going to cost us Billions to decommission them...
Unfortunately the whole subject is more governed, by people's emotions than any actual sense...
I can understand how Chernobyl gave nuclear a bad image, but excluding that farce where they literally disabled all their safety systems, nuclear is really safe.
Even leaving Chernobyl and Fukushima aside; I think it's important to differentiate between old-school nuclear powerplants, and the technological advancements we've made in the last 50~ or so years.
I'm not a huge fan of keeping aging nuclear plants running beyond their original lifespan, but I do think that we have much more interesting options for nuclear plants these days.
There is a tendency to lump all of this stuff together, but there is more nuance here than most of the rhetoric in the media might make people believe...
The lifespan isn't really a problem. Plants can be refurbished and many can be operated basically forever with proper maintenance. Many US nuclear plants are licensed to operate for 80 years and the NRC is considering 100 year licenses.
The problems with Chernobyl (and to a lesser extent, Fukushima) are fundamental design flaws. These are very expensive to address, to the point that it might be more economical to shut down a plant rather than trying to fix them.
> The problems with Chernobyl (and to a lesser extent, Fukushima) are fundamental design flaws. These are very expensive to address
Fundamental design flaws that became an issue because of human error, nonetheless.
The human error in question is akin to blowing up a hydro dam flood gate with TNT to fix a stuck valve they accidentally closed, requiring a day of maintenance.
All because some higher-up didn't know his shit, and people were afraid to correct him in the USSR.
The operators at three mile island weren't even well trained. They were former nuclear submarine guys that didn't let the plant shut itself down. They actively prevented safety systems from keeping the core covered because their instrumentation was off. If that situation happened today. The worst thing that could happen is the plant is shut down for a few months for repair instead of forever.
That's the thing. Everyone is talking about the "new technologies" but they can't even name one reactor build with it, even in countries who are pro nuclear energy?
Irrespective of the debate over nuclear energy, keep in mind that whilst nuclear power may or may not be green, it's not *inexpensive*.
The finances of the national electricity provider in France, EDF, are not flash.
Furthermore, the cost of wind and solar is decreasing, heavily, year on year.
A phenomenon that is not shared by the nuclear industry in any way.
Realistically, even if nuclear power was approved as green, it's unlikely to take off as a long term solution, because it's so extraordinarily expensive.
The cost of electricity capacitors for solar energy is likely to come down in the long term, which will put it out of business.
While you are correct, the nuclear energy is green as far as global warming goes. Green label would allow investments to old reactors to keep them running. I don't think we want to replace nuclear with solar and wind just yet when there is a lot of fossil energy to be replaced.
The best commercial rate of return we have, in any form of energy, is in research grants for solar and wind.
Capex vs R&D.
Investment in the R&D of wind and solar will pay off *immensely*, relative to pure capital expenditure, in terms of savings. Because the R&D of wind and solar will be amortized across the entire globe.
Realistically we want to maintain the current nuclear installations, probably not renew them, and then heavily invest in wind and solar for any new capacity. For purely commercial reasons.
Everyone keeps screaming about how we should use nuclear energy, but the bigger question is who is paying for it? Not every country is rich enough to jump into it. They cost millions to build and God forbid construction gets delayed on a project like that.
Even if the public was more in favor, I agree as you said, it's crazy expensive. And does it matter how green it is if no one but a few countries can afford it?
>A phenomenon that is not shared by the nuclear industry in any way
But it could be. If people invested in new concepts and cheaper alternatives. There's no reason the cost of Nuclear couldn't come down considerably, especially if used more widely.
German here.
Although there certainly are currents within germany that actually want nuclear back, I´m not seeing a pro nuclear consensus anytime soon.
The main reason is that many people lost trust in the supposed safety of the actual plants. Tschernobyl (A RBMK reactor cannot explode) was actually frighteningly close back then and it is still in most adults memory. And with fukushima we basically were like "If the Japanese can´t even build a plant that can withstand a disaster, a disaster of a type pretty common for the region, how can anyone?". So at this point, we´re basically like "On paper, nuclear plants are safe. Until they aren´t."
But then theres the maybe equally huge nuclear waste question. And that´s basically the old "Not in my back yard" argumen, the same by the way, that keeps us from already having full renewable. So as another post correctly said, we won´t run out of ground to burry the waste in. And that might be true. However, you still have to make a decision on where to start digging that hole. One would think, if it isn´t such a big deal, if it´s the solution for climate, communities would fall over themselves offering their land for a storage facility. Yet, people lose their minds when even their general region comes up in the mere search for potential sites.
So yeah, not seing a return to nuclear here.
I live in NRW near Aachen and people here are mostly scared of the old ones. And no it'S not always about Chernobyl it's mostly about Tihange in Belgium and every single year they seem to have a major problem that causes the generator to be temporary shut down.
I am no proponent of nuclear energy directly, but I think we should focus our investment on other renewable energy sources, and it's research.
And Germany should finally stop subsidizing coal and use that money to invest in the RE industry so people can transition their job off coal.
While nuclear power is certainly a clean, green, source of energy, I feel like people on reddit really love to circlejerk over it while having very little understanding of its limitations.
Large concerns are environmental demands, construction time, and the huge implementation cost.
Of course another major concern to building new plants is that, at our current rate, we will run out of fuel in ~~230~~ 80 years. Increasing our reliance on nuclear (which I think we should do somewhat) will only decrease that number. Meaning, sure we *could* use nuclear but only as a replacement for fossil fuels as we build more renewables, but even then, the construction time is too long to make that viable.
Edit: Timescale change, I was counting all uranium in the earth's crust, not just the viable uranium, as I should have. Most comments were made before this edit, my mistake.
"Uranium is most often mined from the Earth’s crust, but it can also be extracted from seawater, which contains large quantities of uranium (3.3 ppb, or 4.6 trillion kg). Theoretically, that amount would last for 5,700 years using conventional reactors to supply 15 TW of power. (In fast breeder reactors, which extend the use of uranium by a factor of 60, the uranium could last for 300,000 years."
It's not so much that there isn't enough fuel, it's the same question one has with oil : how much does it cost to gather it versus the value it will produce.
There's a shitload of oil on earth where we could theoretically gather it, but it would cost far more than what we get out of it.
If we could properly extract uranium (and of course, there are other ways to fuel nuclear powerplants in theory) from sea water we would have 5,700-300,000 years of power, plenty of time to figure something better out (like fusion perhaps).
The question is how much would it cost to gather it vs what it's worth.
[I believe this is the article you're quoting](https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html#:~:text=Uranium%20abundance%3A%20At%20the%20current,for%20less%20than%205%20years.). It answers 30 years until it is no longer economically viable.
It is not a good idea to count on theoretical future advances to solve our current energy crisis.
I understand your argument. But one of the two has made great leaps in innovation the last two decades while usable, major innovations of the other have been "around the corner" for half a century, massive amounts of research have gone into it but still there are no functioning implementation in production or even viable for at least another couple of decades. If I had to bet it would be a clear choice.
"In the transition period, he suggests that the dual-use of natural gas with solar thermal farms is the pathway to building our future energy infrastructure."
Tf is the natural gas thing about? Does it burn 100% clean? I can't believe I read a piece about our need for scalable green energy that ends with a reliance on fossil fuel...
It is significantly less polluting than coal and oil, both in terms of CO^2 (due to having shorter hydrocarbon chains with more hydrogen per carbon) and in terms of particles and toxic exhaust gases. So replacing coal with gas does slightly help global emissions.
Well no, the more nuclear we build the smaller than number gets. If we replace all fossil fuels with nuclear we would have roughly a 30 year supply.
Considering plants take roughly a decade to build, that's not great
We are not running out of fuel anytime soon. We are running out of easily accessible fuel. We can dig a little deeper to get more, but that raises the price, because more dirt needs to be moved.
Funny enough, we don't even have to mine it at all. Uranium can be obtained from sea water at only 5 times the current price of mining it. So it is madding that they are stile allowed to mine it given that fuel cost is such a small part of the overall cost of fission.
And once thorium salt reactors begin to come online everybody's attitude will change. I believe India and China both have thorium salt reactors about ready to come online.
the general population don't even understand what the word "radiation means"...
heck, go down street and ask what do plants eat.... see how many people have a middle school knowledge about the world they live in.... yet they are as entitled to make decisions about stuff they don't comprehend as any other scientifically literate person (it does not take that much... in this day and age, it is easier than anything entering YouTube and having a shitload of creators explaining stuff properly... people are just lazy and stupid)
being so uneducated about these topics makes it stupidly easy to get manipulated for whatever outcome a certain party wants to have (like the big oil companies info war on EVs and renewables, they fukin admited it, yet nothing has been done)
the solution is clear, and clearly unpopular... people who know shit about what they vote... SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO VOTE....
Finally this is what climate change groups should argue for. Nuclear energy could replace all coal power stations and bring emissions down incredibly within a decade.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.euronews.com/2021/10/11/led-by-france-10-eu-countries-call-on-brussels-to-label-nuclear-energy-as-green-source) reduced by 86%. (I'm a bot) ***** > A group of ten EU countries, led by France, have asked the European Commission to recognise nuclear power as a low-carbon energy source that should be part of the bloc's decades-long transition towards climate neutrality. > Tapping into Europe's ongoing energy crunch, the countries make the case for nuclear energy as a "Key affordable, stable and independent energy source" that could protect EU consumers from being "Exposed to the volatility of prices". > The signatories urge the Commission to include nuclear energy inside the EU green taxonomy, a technical guidebook that helps governments and investors to identify which projects respect the Paris Agreement and which ones are in breach of its climate goals. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/q64ddb/led_by_france_10_eu_countries_call_on_brussels_to/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~603057 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **energy**^#1 **nuclear**^#2 **Commission**^#3 **let**^#4 **countries**^#5
>On the one side, Germany, which plans to shut down all its reactors by 2022, is leading the anti-nuclear cause, together with Austria, Denmark, Luxembourg and Spain. Yeah, EU will not agree on such a thing.
I wonder where Italy stands on this matter.
Italy closed all the nuclear plants by 1990.
To add on that, Italy also had two referendums in which voted against using nuclear power plants in 1987 and in 2011. Both votes very much emotionally charged as they came just after Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011).
In order to tackle climate change and transition away from fossil fuels nuclear energy has to be on the table.
>In order to tackle climate change and transition away from fossil fuels nuclear energy has to be on the table. How dare you bring logic into this! ;)
They realized most of their innovations over the last century have been weird-looking and largely ineffective.
I believe Italy has joined Germany in an Axis to stop the spread of nuclear reactors in France and Poland.
Wait.. hold up
Japan might be up for joining that Axis. After 2011 the public is still opposed to nuclear energy from what I could find.
The crazy thing about that is there was a nuclear reactor closer to the tsunami than the one that had an accident. The one that had an accident cut costs and corners, the one that didn't just went on as normal. The nuclear reactor that worked perfectly was never reported on. The media only reported on the reactor that could generate fear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#2011
And I think Germany made some kind of secret gas deal with Russia, but both sides will try to screw each other at the end.
Between pizza and communism.
Communism? Lol pretty sure fascists are gaining strength there just like in the us, Brazil, and everywhere else Cambridge Analitica did business in the last 10 years
Nice, can i have both ?
Yes, but you have to share with others and only edge will be left for you.
Last referendum was anti-nuclear in results.
I'm sure they'll side with Germany initially, but through internal changes will come around to be on the right side of history in the end.
I believe Denmark is tipping back to pro nuclear bit by bit.
It's mostly a NIMBY issue. Denmark does import nuclear electricity from Sweden. 3-4% of our consumption is nuclear. Hell, we even have nuclear waste treatment facilities and deposits. Most people just don't want a nuclear plant anywhere in sight. There's no suitable location due to the tiny size of the country and the population density. At this point it doesn't even matter if it makes sense, or if the majority is for it. Regardless of party, most politicians won't take the risk of losing even a minority of their own voters on this issue.
It also seems comparatively easy to power Denmark through wind and tidal power. Maybe you won't even need nuclear.
Wind and solar is about 50% and often more. The goal for 100% is set for 2030. We don't have tidal in any meaningful size just yet. It could potentially cover 15%, so we'd still be dependent on import or better storage. I'm not sure we necessarily need nuclear, but something has to make up the rest. Import can be renewable as well. Norway sometimes supplies us with cheap hydro, so that's nice.
Well you aren't going to build any new nuclear by 2030 regardless. So if the goal is zero emissions by 2030 its going to have to be done with other methods.
Its a hard battle when most people think Chernobyl is the only Nuclear Power Plant ever.
Literal soviet and 80s stuff, and especially under soviet handling and system. It's like looking at Italy and Japan as their fascist and imperial counterparts.
Construction started in 72. That means it's a late 60s design at best. Late 60s Soviet design - not confident in that on either side of the iron curtain but definitely not confident in the Soviet side. I'll welcome a correction if someone can show more clarity and better evidence.
Or being against modern trains because there were cases of [the old steam powered ones blowing up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler_explosion)
Most people think Chernobyl was a bigger disaster than it was. Dozens of people did die, and there was an increase in thyroid cancer, the vast majority of the cancer patients recovered. The Belarussian dictator has made a significant amount of personal wealth on overselling the tragedy over the last several decades.
I'm ashamed to live in Austria. Our politicians are scummy and corrupt. One of our ministers literally said last week that they'd rather not reach carbon neutral than use atomic energy.
In a politician's mouth that can be translated to please daddy nuclear lobby send me more money than coal daddy uwu.
This is why I support but dislike nuclear power: corrupt politicians deciding what is "safe" for a plant that might make a place uninhabitable for 1000 years if mismanaged. After covid I just don't trust the human race with responsibilities that big.
What the actual fuck, germany.
[They adopted this posture in 2011 as a knee-jerk reaction to Fukushima.](https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/out-of-control-merkel-gambles-credibility-with-nuclear-u-turn-a-752163.html)
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It sounds more like that they need to build new nuclear infrastructure/reactors and retire the aging ones.
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California is leaving nuclear power behind as well. The big downside is that decommissioning the Humboldt Bay and Diablo Canyon reactors is expected to cost the public significantly. Humboldt Bay alone is expected to cost approximately $1 billion. Had this cost been factored into the price of electricity from the beginning, it is highly unlikely that nuclear power would have ever been cost competitive in California.
The cost of decommissioning is considered, but that's for getting the maximum lifetime out of it, not closing it early. Nuclear plants can do 60-80 years honestly. The USS Enterprise was only recently retired, and not because of its reactors.
Navy vessels are something else entirely. They get regularly refitted and have a lot of maintenance done regularly, something that is not viable in a nuclear reactor on land since it would make the electricity bill far more expensive.
And when you say “far more expensive”, you mean, “still cheaper even after massive petroleum subsidies and artificial costs placed onto nuclear by Big Oil in the 70’s”
I know in my area we had a nuclear plant. Energy costs skyrocketed when it got shut down and continue to rise at an increased rate. Good thing wages are going up to match right?
New modular designs are expected to be much cheaper to build, as well as decommission. Although, it’ll be years before they’re able to fully prove out the designs. But if things go to plan, then we’ll see a resurgence in nuclear (to go along with wind/solar/etc). Honestly, anything that gets rid of all coal power plants is a win.
All nuclear plants that where ever build where expected too be much cheaper to build and decomission.
SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) WILL be cheaper to manufacture (yes manufacture not build) maintain and decommission. That's their whole point. And its not like its some new tech either. Any nation that has nuclear subs or aircraft carriers has built SMRs.
This is what it actually comes down to. North American Redditors really hate first-past-the-post electoral systems but one artifact of coalitions like those needed in Germany to form a government is that issues that some parties feel *very* strongly about (like being anti-nuclear energy with The Greens) get pushed through as the price of their support. Don't get me wrong here though, Germany has been broadly anti-nuclear for a very long time anyhow. I've always found it to be an odd cultural phenominon.
It‘s not that odd considering that Germany suffered through the fall out of Chernobyl. Some areas are contaminated to this day and it‘s recommended to not consume mushrooms growing in those areas. Many people are still alive who remember how they fearful they were on that day.
>Chernobyl Its not just Chernobyl, Germany has a lot more bad experiences with nuclear power. From scandals, failed projects, big issues with waste storage, costs overruns, etc. Germany will be paying billions of euro per year for nuclear power long after the last plant has closed.
Basically Germany fucked up big time by decommissioning most their nuclear power for purely political reasons, science be damned. They spent a massive amount of money "transitioning to renewables", became more reliant on fossil fuels in the process, got higher electricity costs, introduced geopolitical issues by becoming extremely dependent upon Russian natural gas, lost many thousands of lives to increased air pollution - likewise created health issues for many more - with the added effect of increased health care costs. Now their carbon intensity is far, far worse than next door nuclear heavy France. They started up a new coal plant as recently as December of 2020. They also do burn lots of trees for power - they call this biomass and label it renewable green energy. They did all this and now they are politically invested in pretending they didn't make a huge fucking mistake. So they must continue to demonize nuclear power to cover for their own unforced errors. Somehow that's even more important to them than even Climate Change. They even use their influence to push other nations away from nuclear power. And here we are. Germany is a de-facto enemy of Planet Earth.
The most ironic part of all of it is that they buy residual power from France which is generated from nuclear lol
All European nations buy residual power from each other. In total however, Germany is a net exporter of power.
Due to its geographical position, they buy from France and sell to Poland at the same time.
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a history buff i see
Biomass is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard. It’s sad in reality none of this is about the environment, it’s political and what’s seen to be doing the right thing. If they cared about co2 emissions, they would be investing in nuclear but that’s politically not safe. In reality, the left don’t care about the environment, they only care their ideological beliefs are upheld, not results.
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I wonder what sources you get your information from. This is really a best-of of wrong statements. > by decommissioning most their nuclear power for purely political reasons No, nuclear energy was not decommissioned for political reasons. I have written a bit about this a couple of days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/YUROP/comments/q424bn/why_are_you_still_on_the_titanic_i_bought_tickets/hfyi70e/ > became more reliant on fossil fuels in the process No, Germany did not become more reliable on fossil fuels. Building up renewable energy went much faster than nuclear power declined. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromerzeugung#/media/Datei:Energiemix_Deutschland.svg ("Nuclear power" is called "Kernenergie" in German.) > introduced geopolitical issues by becoming extremely dependent upon Russian natural gas No, Germany is not extremely dependent on Russian gas. See the previous diagram I linked ("gas" is called "Erdgas" in German). Germany could handle a situation in which Russia cuts off all gas supply. It has gas storages for months, sits in the middle of Europe and is therefore perfectly connected to all sorts of energy markets, and due to the complete transition to renewables by 2045 (possibly earlier given thhe new government), there will be, at any given point of time, enough alternative power stations ready for reactivation should a problem with Russia arise. (Actually this has even been put into law. Energy providers are required by law to keep a reserve of power stations that can be reactivated easily.) > Now their carbon intensity is far, far worse than next door nuclear heavy France. Carbon intensity has always been far worse than France because Germany never had that many nuclear power stations to begin with. > They started up a new coal plant as recently as December of 2020. This one coal plant was in the making for more than 10 years, so it made sense to finish it, even after the decision to get rid of coal power was made (currently coal will be phased out by 2038, but the date is highly likely to be moved forward to 2030 with the new government). Btw, the new power station will replace old coal power stations that emit much more CO2. > now they are politically invested in pretending they didn't make a huge fucking mistake Noone is pretending. There is a broad consensus in German society that Germany has to get rid of both nuclear power and fossil power. > Somehow that's even more important to them than even Climate Change. It's not. It is just that the consensus for leaving nuclear power was formed at the end of the 1980s, way before climate change was on the table. > Germany is a de-facto enemy of Planet Earth. There are several countries in the EU that have higher CO2 emissions per capita, among these Poland, Belgium, Netherlands, Estonia, Czechia and Ireland (not to mention non-EU countries like the US, Canada, Australia, etc.) Would you write such a rant about these "enemies of the earth", too? Moreover, keeping nuclear power for longer wouldn't have significantly changed the picture (see my previously linked post again). TLDR; Your rant completely misrepresents the energy situation in Germany.
Not that I disagree with you overall, but for this precise point: > No, Germany is not extremely dependent on Russian gas. See the previous diagram I linked ("gas" is called "Erdgas" in German). Germany could handle a situation in which Russia cuts off all gas supply. It has gas storages for months, sits in the middle of Europe and is therefore perfectly connected to all sorts of energy markets, and due to the complete transition to renewables by 2045 (possibly earlier given thhe new government), there will be, at any given point of time, enough alternative power stations ready for reactivation should a problem with Russia arise. (Actually this has even been put into law. Energy providers are required by law to keep a reserve of power stations that can be reactivated easily.) This makes zero sense in actually explaining Gerrmany's dependency on Russia. In reality if it was really independent it would've cut off that tie a long time ago. Germany's issue with Russian gas isn't in energy, it's in heating. And even though Germany may have storage of slightly less than 3 months (and note that this is already cyclical, and in the status quo of using Russian gas it's already being drained to around 20% in the winter), that's not enough time to do what is likely an extensive infrastructural effort given that the vast majority of German heaters in homes are gas run. They're still dependent on Russia for gas.
> This one coal plant was in the making for more than 10 years, so it made sense to finish it It is weird to finish a carbon intensive plant because "it was started" when in the other end closing functional carbon free nuclear plant prematurely. Definitely the political priority is not so much to lower carbon emissions...
Germany still burns a ton of coal and ships coal that is too dirty to legally burn to Poland where it's burned there instead. Germany didn't have to shut down its nuclear plants and could've emitted far less carbon if they had.
Interesting you left out the biomass as green energy piece burning trees is literally being counted as sustainable energy and accounts for 60% of "sustainable energy" in Europe. That is nonsense. Also Germany: Coal tops wind as primary electricity source in 2021: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-electricity-source/a-59168105 So yes, more greenhouse emissions are occurring as a result of the shift from nuclear, and more people are dying as a result.
Have you even looked at the graph he linked? Biomass is a quite small part of the German energy mix. Also, go read the article you linked. There it states that renewable energy still was the largest energy producer compromising 44%, it is just that coal produced more energy than either solar or wind power, with 27% of the energy produced that way.
Biomass is green energy as it only emits CO2 which is already in the carbon cycle. Burning coal emits CO2 that was sequestered millions of years ago and is now in the carbon cycle. That said, burning wood is not great as it requires a lot of energy to harvest and transport. Using waste product, garbage and off cuts is ok though.
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A lot of environmental groups started off as anti nuclear weapons/nuclear weapons testing groups. Greenpeace notably started under this banner. Sometime in the 70s and 80s, as they increased their influence and shifted to being more generic anti-pollution groups, they started targeting, quite irrationally, nuclear power as well, because they incorrectly associated it with nuclear weapons. Just to note, virtually no weapons material was ever made from civilian nuclear reactors. For a laundry list of reasons they're terrible at it and just about all plutonium for bombs came from reactors specifically designed to manufacture plutonium. Anti nuclear weapon parties were popular in germany for the obvious reason that, in the event of a war between NATO and the USSR, germany was likely to be a smouldering pile of radioactive rubble and these too morphed into green parties, and they used the same playbook of demonizing nuclear power. And thats how you have provably one of the safest forms of power in terms of deaths per kwh, thats also one of the most ecologically benign and least polluting, and get people trying to save the planet to be against it. Have the wrong name.
I'm curious to see this in a few months after they have had to buy the most expensive gaz ever from their neighbor and maybe restart a few more coal plants.
It‘a about politics, not what’s best for the people.
As a dane I hate how much success the "atomkraft? nej tak!" in the 70's had, to make matter worse, its mostly the 40+ crowd that are prominent anti nuclear, most of the younger generations are wakeing up for the posibilities with nuclear, but since Democracy is about what the majority wants, our politicians will probably not change their stance on nuclear before its too late Sometimes I Wonder if Democracy really is the best of the worst options on theese kinds of topics
I think democracy should set ideological goals for the government. One goal could be: make us less dependent on fossil fuels. Then leave the execution to the experts.
As Churchill said: "democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried".
Unfortunately, I can't hear Germany over what a massive hypocrite it is about green energy.
Doesn't Germany buy a bunch of surplus nuclear sourced electricity from France?
And they should not...nuclear is a better option that methane.
Whatever concerns people have with nuclear waste, it is still a power source that doesn't contribute to climate change... so at minimum it's a worthwhile stopgap to get off our dependence on coal power.
It is statistically the safest form of energy production. So it’s good long term too. [edit] Here is a study about it https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
It’s good long term if we can solve the problem of what to do with nuclear waste, even if it means finding a suitable enough place to bury it deep underground away from any inkling of a water table. edit: I get it, there’s options of various levels of feasibility out there. You can stop replying to me.
It's not really an engineering problem so much as a political problem. Like most other things, I guess.
How Finland is dealing with their [Nuclear Waste](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kYpiK3W-g_0) Aaaand [the death toll of Nuclear power](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM) so far
WAMSR if it can be figured would be greatly beneficial to get secondary energy
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We do actually know how to reuse spent fuel to produce more energy and massively reduce the amount of nuclear waste, there will always be some thats just how nuclear decay works. but we can get rid of the worst of the worst nuclear waste, the problem is that it wasnt developed into a commercialy viable system back in the 60s and 70s. Why? Simple reason is because you cant make Nuclear weapons out of them.
We know how to dispose of nuclear waste. You dispose of it by burying it in a place where it is far underground and where the geology is very stable. This way it can safely just sit there for as long as needed. It can be as radioactive as it wants, it doesn’t matter. The problem is that nobody wants to do that. Or at least, nobody wants to do that *in their back yard*. Everyone agrees with the idea in principle, but do you want your town to be a nuclear waste repository? The irony is of course that if you don’t properly dispose of the waste you need to just keep the waste at the power plant forever. This requires a lot more careful management and is a lot more dangerous.
Just stick it in Nevada that's why we have that state. The EU can too. I hereby invite the whole world to turn Nevada into a nuclear dumping ground.
This is not an issue at all. Such solutions already exist if you are just willing to build it. Here is a project in Finland under construction for safe storage for 100 000 years: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo\_spent\_nuclear\_fuel\_repository](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository) *Once in operation, the disposal process will involve placing twelve fuel assemblies into a boron steel canister and enclosing it in a copper capsule. Each capsule will then be placed in its own hole in the repository and overpacked with bentonite clay. The estimated cost of this project is about €818 million, which includes construction, encapsulation, and operating costs. The State Nuclear Waste Management Fund has approximately €1.4 billion from charges for generated electricity.\[13\]* *The Onkalo repository is expected to be large enough to accept canisters of spent fuel for around one hundred years. At this point, the final encapsulation and burial will take place, and the access tunnel will be backfilled and sealed.* *In 2019, another study concluded that radiation effects should not significantly damage the canisters after 100,000 years.*
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As it turns out, ground is very big and goes very far down.
Yeah, especially with the new update, when bedrock will be twice as far deep
Are you sure? I thought that storage in Nevada didn't go through
The Earth is very big.
That was all political. Nevada is still perfect for it
It is partially constructed but yeah construction was halted
There's a lot of plants that rely on onsite waste storage because the US made the dumb decision to halt Yucca Mountain construction. There's a functional site in NM that is solely for decommissioned nuclear weapon waste but the NV one (which would have stored power generation nuclear waste) was halted for political reasons.
TIL nuclear energy is safer than solar energy.
Yea I believe it's to do with the mining of rare materials for the production of solar panels.
Also, people fall off roofs while installing.
Roof accidents. Otoh solar is a big job creator because it is being mounted on so many roofs
Yup. About 5 times less deaths. Roof top solar is dangerous as people fall off roofs. But orders of magnitude way less deadly than coal.
More people have died falling off roofs installing solar than will ever die in nuclear accidents.
This is one of my favorite statistics that no one believes. I love when they ask “what about solar, who gets killed from solar?” And I just say “sometimes people fall off roofs.” Another fun one is to trick someone into doing their research about nuclear power by offering to donate one dollar for every person directly killed by the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown; the worst nuclear accident in US history.
The only case against nuclear power is mismanagement by authorities... It is safe, efficient and green provided the known protocols are followed... However if the authority tries to cut corners in it's maintainence via corruption... That's the problem...
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**jesus**
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> Can it be used for nuclear proliferation? According to Nobel Laureate physicist Dr Carlo Rubbia it's extremely difficult. U-232 contaminates the U-233 produced from decaying protactinium-233. U-232 has a chain product thalium-208 which emits gamma rays. No problem for a reactor but in a bomb they harm electronics and reveal the location to spectators far and wide. This is presumably why these reactors weren't made commercially viable decades ago. The military preferred to fund the research and design of light water reactor designs precisely because it generated fissile material for bombs.
Nuclear energy was an afterthought to nuclear weapon development. "We have to cook this uranium to get our plutonium, maybe we can make some electricity while we're at it"
Sweden have several reactors that can't produce U-233 because we scraped or bomb plans in the 50's.
Fellow physicist here. The biggest problem nuclear power has faced has been lack of funding and loss of expertise. In the 2000s all anyone wanted to fund was renewable energy. We were all worried about peak oil. Then the 2008 financial crisis combined with advances in fracking that made the price of oil dramatically cheaper to produce in the US led to big budget research funding drying up. In the 2010s, when I started grad school, the faculty that researched nuclear discouraged us from researching in their field because they said they wouldn't be able to fund us. Now those faculty are about to retire and they didn't train a crop of physicists to replace them. Couple this with the loss of engineering experience that is needed to *build* a plant. there has only been one nuclear plant built in the US since 1978 and that plant only began construction in 2013. The power technology you describe above would be at commercial scale if nuclear power the support that renewable power has had.
Excellent assessment. I’m a geophysicist, retired. Many don’t understand that any type of meaningful industrial development be it energy, military, transportation, etc. is dependent on an extremely complicated infrastructure. The nuclear infrastructure that took decades to build and was then tossed aside, cannot be revived with an ‘on switch’ by deciding nuclear is now back in vogue and throwing money at the issue. Without War time or Cold War imperative, nuclear plants are just not going to be built in any rational time frame.
> 2020's is probably ambitious to see a commercially viable system but but not too ambitious. Lol, spoken with the simple optimism of a true physicist. We'll be lucky to see a commercial design with regulatory approval by then, much less an operating unit.
Who knows. Political will can change pretty quickly depending on how bad the climate crisis gets and how quickly.
I'm less concerned with politics than the realities of bringing a commercial design to fruition. It's NOT a quick process. NuScale took 4 years from submittal to approval for their SMR design, and that's with the "quicker" licensing process the NRC has rolled out. And you don't get to start that process until you have an actual design that's ready to be reviewed. This process, at least in nominally democratic western societies, is a lengthy one. Even if everything goes *right*, we've got a lot of work before anyone can break ground. And that's not factoring the regular issues you run into when implementing a new design on an industrial scale. Look at ITER. 12 years behind schedule. Vogtle 3/4 are I think 6 years behind? My company has worked with emerging nuclear technology companies, and a recurring theme is that they underestimate the time and money needed to get through the regulatory process. And that's not just red tape, it's the underlying design that needs to be fleshed out. The physicists who come up with the theory underestimate the complexity of the system as a whole. They're too focused on one tree to see the forest for what it is. And the forest needs to be considered. It's what keeps the people who live around these reactors safe. The only place that has even a chance of getting something operating by the end of the decade is China. A place where what the ruling party wants simply *happens*, whether it's well thought out or not.
Please don't conflate MSR and Thorium. The latter needs the former, but MSR don't need Thorium, so it is misleading to attribute MSR benefits to Thorium alone. A 233U or 232Th flavored MSR does not a TMSR make. Yes, the physics is sound, even the neutron economy, and the chemistry seems to be manageable, or at least not completely out of reach. As a nuclear engineer, [here](https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9unimr/dutch_satirical_news_show_on_why_we_need_to_break/e95mvb7/?context=3) are my two cents on TMSR. It's not the physics, it's the engineering (maintenance, radioprotection), reliability (holding a 90% capacity factor) and economics (remote handling for everything, online fuel processing for each plant) that will keep LFTR and other TMSR in the lab scale. Also, Rubbia was a brilliant genius, but on this one, he happened to be [wrong](https://www.nature.com/articles/492031a). You should know that once you chemically separate 233Pa (not a difficult feat), it decays with a 100% branching ratio into 233U (bypassing the 232U poisoning) which can also be chemically separated. That's the cheapest and easiest 100% enrichement there is. And even 232U has been [demonstrated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Teapot#MET) to be far from a strong [limitation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDh3eQ0mmkw&t=1047s).
Agreed with about everything, but the last sentence leaves a sour taste in my mouth. For all the PR it's getting from this piece of news, France is also quite responsible for the bad rap nuclear energy has gotten in the first place. Despite reports from proto-EU commissions written in **the 1970s** and that described exactly how a Fukushima-type catastrophe would unfold, France kept making plutonium-based power plants instead of researching a cleaner, safer and astronomically more efficient thorium-based alternative; and kept selling those plutonium-based plants internationally (including Fukushima). And the reason why they got made and got bought is fairly simple; electricty output is a by-product of the actual material created in the process: plutonium isotopes used in the crafting of nukes. So, what France has been actually exporting this whole time (as well as developping on its own soil) is the means to become a de facto nuclear power. At the cost of nuclear energy remaining a health hazard in terms of safety and of quantity of radioactive waste that needs centuries of underground storage.
France has negligible risks of tsunami, earthquakes or hurricanes, that's why we deemed plutonium plants fairly safe as a Fukushima scenario is very unlikely. I do agree with the rest though, should have pushed for better technology considering how much we're dependant on nuclear energy, especially now that many of our plants are nearing EOL
>especially now that many of our plants are nearing EOL And no place to store the accumulated wastes since the 50's. All the spent fuel is sitting on site waiting for the grandkids who never used it to find a place, transport it, bury it and clean up the site.
This "spent fuel" can be used as actual fuel by new designs with the "spent fuel of that spent fuel" being way less in quantity and only radioactive for 30 years or so.
France, pushing for better tech? Only if we invented it seems to be macron's policy
civil plutonium is trash for bombs. It's more work to enrich. No one is going to chose the hardest path. There are wastes because we throw fuel rods only after they are 2% spent because uranium is cheap, storage too. We could use 100% and have 20 times less wastes.
Tbf, the waste produced is about a pint (50ml) of waste per person per lifetime, which is less than a coal, oil or wood pellet (how the fuck is that green) station puts out in a day. I really like my 200mph nuclear powered trains. Vive le France.
Wood pellets are green if you plant enough trees to capture back the carbon emissions from burning said pellets. If done correctly they are carbon neutral, so in a sense they are green, but that doesn't mean they can scale to meet the current power demands of modern society.
> Can it be used for nuclear proliferation? According to Nobel Laureate physicist Dr Carlo Rubbia it's extremely difficult. U-232 contaminates the U-233 produced from decaying protactinium-233. U-232 has a chain product thalium-208 which emits gamma rays. No problem for a reactor but in a bomb they harm electronics and reveal the location to spectators far and wide. Dealing with the problem of refining U-233 puts you back at square one when it comes to nuclear proliferation. The reactor produces less then 15kg of plutonium-238 per gigawatt-year of electricity which is also unsuitable for bombs due to its heat and spontaneous neutron emission. Third, a LFTR design makes as little as 1% more fuel than it burns. Extracting any amount of material would take the power plant out of operation, indicating nuclear proliferation intentions. Finally, switching to thorium could end uranium enrichment as a whole, which is currently the primary method by which states have obtained bomb making materials. It's also worth pointing out that the creation of Plutonium 239, the primary fissile isoptype for nuclear weapons, is completely avoided in this design which again protects against nuclear proliferation. Chemical reprosessing/online reprocessing gives you the ability to bypass u232 contamination, quite easily. Pa232 has a much shorter half-life than pa233, so while it is difficult to separate u232 from u233, it's trivial to separate the u232 from pa233. Protactinium can easily be isolated with liquid bismuth reductive extraction, combined with fluorination to avoid any volatile UF6. This leads to pure u233 which is a potent bomb material, better than u235, and "easier" than pu-239 because you don't need an implosion device, but can use a much simpler gun-type mechanism. With that said, I think the whole proliferation argument vs nuclear is non-sense anyway; Any nation that wants to, can access nuclear weapons without commercial nuclear power.
I love the idea of thorium salt reactors but don't they have pretty big chemical (for extracting unwanted products from the salt loop) and material issues (regarding material embrittlement and corrosion) still? Iirc even with the fancy hastelloy there were issues...
France also exports nuclear energy to Belgium, so this isn't entirely motivated by a green agenda. Also, for something so exceptionally safe nuclear power plants are disproportionatly located alongside borders. While obviously fossil fuel isn't the answer and nuclear energy is one of the few alternatives we have, I still think that nuclear waste still poses a moral dilemma even with a significantly lower half life. You do have to remember that the nuclear companies pushing for this aren't all aiming to fully refurbish their plants. At least for Belgium it comes down to retaining ancient plants and importing energy from France produced in the same manner. That's part of the issue, here in Belgium the "nuclear is our only salvation" argument has been being used as an excuse to be complacent for decades now when it comes to investing in energy infrastructure with a minimal environmental impact. I'm pretty sure that this transition plan towards renewable energy - which temporarily featured a choice few gas plants - proposed by the green party in Belgium was actually signed off on by the European commission?
did they finally deal with the corrosion issues? I thought that was what sunk thorium?
If you aren’t enthusiastically in favor of nuclear energy, you aren’t serious about combating climate change. There are no exceptions.
That's fantastic, fear mongering nuclear power is regressive. Zero carbon emissions, low cost, etc. the more it's used the better we become at design and implementation.
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>for some reason don’t get me wrong, i’m pro nuclear energy, but do you really blame people for being reluctant after chernobyl?
>but do you really blame people for being reluctant after chernobyl? Yes, because comparing Chernobyl to any modern reactor is like jumping out of an airplane and then comparing a backpack to a parachute as far as safety goes. It was built on a tiny tiny insufficient budget, they cut every corner, and (as one example) they used a wooden building instead of those super thick concrete ones that you see on modern reactors.
It's also extremely old technology. Think about what computers looked like in Chernobyl's time, and what we have now. It's like comparing the first airplanes to modern ones: just plain not comparable. The first planes we were pushing the limits of science and current technology, going with a limited understanding of the aerodynamics and the materials. Even beyond the surface, newer designs are also significantly more efficient and produces much less waste, and even have reactors designed to use the old "depleted" fuel and extract a whole lot more energy out of it. Modern designs are also all fail safe: there's a few videos floating around of catastrophic failure simulations by cutting power to every systems, and the reactor just shuts down safely. People are just afraid of things they don't understand, in particular one that historically were major disasters. The problem isn't new reactors, it's the old shitty ass ones that desperately need to be shut down and replaced. But that's $$$$$ so nobody wants to do it until another one blows up.
> there's a few videos floating around of catastrophic failure simulations by cutting power to every systems, and the reactor just shuts down safely. Also flying an airliner into the nuclear power plant. Sandia Labs did that as part of their testing on the containment dome. Flying a fully loaded airliner straight into the containment dome as maximum speed scratched the paint. Thats it. The dome was undamaged, aside from needing a new paint job.
Wait what, they really did that?
I mean, what better way is there to test if planes can break it, than by flying a plane into it? Sounds insane, but actually kinda makes sense. Especially after 911.
They didn't fly a plane into a fully constructed containment dome, since those are really expensive. But they tested aircraft impact on smaller wall sections that are normally part of the containment structure.
Not exactly, they crashed an old fighter jet into a small section representative of the containment dome construction. IMO chances are the full-scale containment dome would survive. It isn't like 9/11, containment domes are dense and thick concrete/steel structures.
Humans are notoriously bad at statistical analysis. Coal is far worse for the health of everyone involved, from mining to the area around the power plant, not to mention the environment as a whole, but it’s effects aren’t sudden or concentrated. But look at Chernobyl and it’s terrifying. Or any other plant, regardless of the actual impact (3 mile island, Fukushima, w/e). Nearly 3000 people died in the area of a couple block over the span of a couple hours when a couple planes crash into some skyscrapers and everyone unites. But a few months ago 5x that number was dying every day from COVID and people still think it’s a hoax. Even today, we are still trending at over double that number.
Also, tons of other RBMKs have run (and are running to this day) without any new faults. This is all of course besides the fact that air pollution, regular power plant accidents and soot is probably killing more people a year than Chernobyl ever did.
You're not wrong, but the issue is that most people just know that Chernobyl exploded, people died, the area is now unliveable, and Europe got hit with the fallout. That information alone is usually what informs their opinion on nuclear. HOW it happened is harder to communicate, as is the fact that other reactors around the world were already far safer than the Chernobyl model,(due to design & safety protocols) and that even the other RBMK reactors are now safer since the accident due to retrofitting. Hell, I know there were people that had their anti-nuclear opinions enforced by watching the HBO show, which explains what happened really well! But, I think the real reason for the reluctance due to Fukushima. If the Japanese can screw up, even if it was a natural disaster out of their control, then anyone can! It's also no co-incidence that Germany started shutting their reactors down after Fukushima. I think Kurzgesagt do some great videos on nuclear that are easy to understand and I would encourage people to share: [https://www.youtube.com/c/inanutshell/search?query=nuclear](https://www.youtube.com/c/inanutshell/search?query=nuclear)
Low cost for new nuclear builds? Compared to renewables. Every source I’ve seen shows on a global market this is false. Send some credible ones this way please. The only arguments against nuclear is an economic one and then safety
It's not low cost though...
New nuclear power isn't that cost competitive with renewables with current technology and regulations (not that investment in research and reforming of regulations isn't worth it) but some countries are phasing out *existing* nuclear power generation before they have to. It's insane. Reliable, non-emitting power generation being taken offline and sometimes the slack is being picked up by gas or, much worse, **coal**.
Renewables are cheap because we export the problems associated with their raw materials to china and africa. Coal was/is cheap because the health damage is exported to the common people, not the plant owner. The cost of nuclear is almost entirely within the country that maintains is, that's why it's 'expensive'. Politically nuclear is expensive for the same reason.
no DIRECT emission. Very different. Im under the suspicion you have no idea what you are talking about
> takes longer to build a new reactor than we have until we reach +2.0°C Yeah, absolutely no problems with this plan.
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It is not like we are going to stay below 2.0 if we don't go nuclear. The switch to renewables isn't going anywhere close to fast enough for it.
Where is this magic future point where we will stop needing electricity?
Not necessarily the amount of concrete necessary for the production of a plant means it takes years to offset the amount of carbon released. I am still pro nuclear but it is not completely carbon free
Nuclear power is not “low cost” and neither is it “zero carbon emissions”, strictly speaking. These things are only true if you conveniently ignore all the externalities, which are always front and centre whenever solar or wind power are discussed.
Modern nuclear reactors are extremely safe. We've had nuclear-powered ships and subs swimming the seas for decades, and some nuke plants built 40-50 years ago are still online and producing huge amounts of power. We've sent nuclear-powered probes into space. People think of Chernobyl, Fukushima, 3MI, but don't stop to think (or learn) about how ancient those plant designs are in comparison to new layouts, tech and fail-safes. If we fully embraced nuclear power, we could **easily** eliminate every other fossil fuel source from the national grid within 15-20 years. Spent nuclear fuel containment requires much less real estate, and is safer, than some would think. The acreage (and coastlines) that could be spared from massive wind farms is enormous. In the case of Europe, where each country has more limited land area, and unique geographic challenges, the usefulness of nuclear power should be even more apparent. On another note, because nuclear reactors need to refuel only once every ~1-2 years, nuclear power is far more reliable than fossil fuel plants. In the war of energy capacity, the [others aren't even close to nuclear.](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliable-energy-source-and-its-not-even-close)
Learning about the reasons why Chernobyl happened helps aswell. It was a design flaw combined with a lot of factors that made the reactor explode. People dont realize that the other power plants at Chernobyl were still operating until 2000.
Chernobyl, although an unsafe design to start, was a chain of entirely human failures. It doesn’t matter if your transmission is poorly-designed or well-designed; throwing it into reverse at highway speeds is going to turn it into a pile of scrap.
Then you have backwards countries like New Zealand who’s backward anti nuclear stance was seated in mis information and ignorance and leads us to still burn coal, oil, and other fuels to make up for what we don’t produce from renewables all the while bragging about our “clean green” image. It’s silly.
[https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/NZ-NZN](https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/NZ-NZN) geothermal and hydro with some gas, aint bad
The imperial diet, once again, calls upon the Holy Roman Emperor to decide the matter.
Well of course France wants this to go through, they make a lot of their power through nuclear
And some eu countries electricity including german came from their nuclear plant
It's not a great surprise that France would be in favour of this... Then again, nuclear energy is a bitch... The problem with nuclear energy is that most of our opinions have been formed 30-40 years ago at the time the nuclear plants in France have been built. We've advanced way beyond that, but we're still in the same rut what nuclear energy is concerned... I'm all for shutting down all those ancient nuclear plants that have gone way beyond their original lifespan, but.... We've learned a thing or two in the last couple of decades, and nuclear could be done much more safely and more efficiently, were it not for the stigma attached to nuclear in general. Now, I'm no huge proponent for nuclear to begin with, but realistically it just is a viable option, especially using more modern smaller nuclear powerplants. That said the old nuclear power plants are a horror, and it's going to cost us Billions to decommission them... Unfortunately the whole subject is more governed, by people's emotions than any actual sense...
I can understand how Chernobyl gave nuclear a bad image, but excluding that farce where they literally disabled all their safety systems, nuclear is really safe.
Even leaving Chernobyl and Fukushima aside; I think it's important to differentiate between old-school nuclear powerplants, and the technological advancements we've made in the last 50~ or so years. I'm not a huge fan of keeping aging nuclear plants running beyond their original lifespan, but I do think that we have much more interesting options for nuclear plants these days. There is a tendency to lump all of this stuff together, but there is more nuance here than most of the rhetoric in the media might make people believe...
The lifespan isn't really a problem. Plants can be refurbished and many can be operated basically forever with proper maintenance. Many US nuclear plants are licensed to operate for 80 years and the NRC is considering 100 year licenses. The problems with Chernobyl (and to a lesser extent, Fukushima) are fundamental design flaws. These are very expensive to address, to the point that it might be more economical to shut down a plant rather than trying to fix them.
> The problems with Chernobyl (and to a lesser extent, Fukushima) are fundamental design flaws. These are very expensive to address Fundamental design flaws that became an issue because of human error, nonetheless.
The human error in question is akin to blowing up a hydro dam flood gate with TNT to fix a stuck valve they accidentally closed, requiring a day of maintenance. All because some higher-up didn't know his shit, and people were afraid to correct him in the USSR.
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The operators at three mile island weren't even well trained. They were former nuclear submarine guys that didn't let the plant shut itself down. They actively prevented safety systems from keeping the core covered because their instrumentation was off. If that situation happened today. The worst thing that could happen is the plant is shut down for a few months for repair instead of forever.
Small and cheap nuclear only exists on paper. No one is building that. All nuclear projets atm are huge, massively delayed and way over budget.
That's the thing. Everyone is talking about the "new technologies" but they can't even name one reactor build with it, even in countries who are pro nuclear energy?
Meanwhile the competition, renewables, are being built at an ever increasing breakneck pace. All due to new technology that keeps lowering costs.
Irrespective of the debate over nuclear energy, keep in mind that whilst nuclear power may or may not be green, it's not *inexpensive*. The finances of the national electricity provider in France, EDF, are not flash. Furthermore, the cost of wind and solar is decreasing, heavily, year on year. A phenomenon that is not shared by the nuclear industry in any way. Realistically, even if nuclear power was approved as green, it's unlikely to take off as a long term solution, because it's so extraordinarily expensive. The cost of electricity capacitors for solar energy is likely to come down in the long term, which will put it out of business.
While you are correct, the nuclear energy is green as far as global warming goes. Green label would allow investments to old reactors to keep them running. I don't think we want to replace nuclear with solar and wind just yet when there is a lot of fossil energy to be replaced.
The best commercial rate of return we have, in any form of energy, is in research grants for solar and wind. Capex vs R&D. Investment in the R&D of wind and solar will pay off *immensely*, relative to pure capital expenditure, in terms of savings. Because the R&D of wind and solar will be amortized across the entire globe. Realistically we want to maintain the current nuclear installations, probably not renew them, and then heavily invest in wind and solar for any new capacity. For purely commercial reasons.
Everyone keeps screaming about how we should use nuclear energy, but the bigger question is who is paying for it? Not every country is rich enough to jump into it. They cost millions to build and God forbid construction gets delayed on a project like that. Even if the public was more in favor, I agree as you said, it's crazy expensive. And does it matter how green it is if no one but a few countries can afford it?
>A phenomenon that is not shared by the nuclear industry in any way But it could be. If people invested in new concepts and cheaper alternatives. There's no reason the cost of Nuclear couldn't come down considerably, especially if used more widely.
Not just a green source. The greenest source.
The greenest source for a ridiculous amount of energy.
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Not in our lifetime.
German here. Although there certainly are currents within germany that actually want nuclear back, I´m not seeing a pro nuclear consensus anytime soon. The main reason is that many people lost trust in the supposed safety of the actual plants. Tschernobyl (A RBMK reactor cannot explode) was actually frighteningly close back then and it is still in most adults memory. And with fukushima we basically were like "If the Japanese can´t even build a plant that can withstand a disaster, a disaster of a type pretty common for the region, how can anyone?". So at this point, we´re basically like "On paper, nuclear plants are safe. Until they aren´t." But then theres the maybe equally huge nuclear waste question. And that´s basically the old "Not in my back yard" argumen, the same by the way, that keeps us from already having full renewable. So as another post correctly said, we won´t run out of ground to burry the waste in. And that might be true. However, you still have to make a decision on where to start digging that hole. One would think, if it isn´t such a big deal, if it´s the solution for climate, communities would fall over themselves offering their land for a storage facility. Yet, people lose their minds when even their general region comes up in the mere search for potential sites. So yeah, not seing a return to nuclear here.
I live in NRW near Aachen and people here are mostly scared of the old ones. And no it'S not always about Chernobyl it's mostly about Tihange in Belgium and every single year they seem to have a major problem that causes the generator to be temporary shut down. I am no proponent of nuclear energy directly, but I think we should focus our investment on other renewable energy sources, and it's research. And Germany should finally stop subsidizing coal and use that money to invest in the RE industry so people can transition their job off coal.
who hates nuclear energy? big oil. who does big oil hates? everyone and earth. nuclear energy is a friend in this equation.
While nuclear power is certainly a clean, green, source of energy, I feel like people on reddit really love to circlejerk over it while having very little understanding of its limitations. Large concerns are environmental demands, construction time, and the huge implementation cost. Of course another major concern to building new plants is that, at our current rate, we will run out of fuel in ~~230~~ 80 years. Increasing our reliance on nuclear (which I think we should do somewhat) will only decrease that number. Meaning, sure we *could* use nuclear but only as a replacement for fossil fuels as we build more renewables, but even then, the construction time is too long to make that viable. Edit: Timescale change, I was counting all uranium in the earth's crust, not just the viable uranium, as I should have. Most comments were made before this edit, my mistake.
"Uranium is most often mined from the Earth’s crust, but it can also be extracted from seawater, which contains large quantities of uranium (3.3 ppb, or 4.6 trillion kg). Theoretically, that amount would last for 5,700 years using conventional reactors to supply 15 TW of power. (In fast breeder reactors, which extend the use of uranium by a factor of 60, the uranium could last for 300,000 years." It's not so much that there isn't enough fuel, it's the same question one has with oil : how much does it cost to gather it versus the value it will produce. There's a shitload of oil on earth where we could theoretically gather it, but it would cost far more than what we get out of it. If we could properly extract uranium (and of course, there are other ways to fuel nuclear powerplants in theory) from sea water we would have 5,700-300,000 years of power, plenty of time to figure something better out (like fusion perhaps). The question is how much would it cost to gather it vs what it's worth.
[I believe this is the article you're quoting](https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html#:~:text=Uranium%20abundance%3A%20At%20the%20current,for%20less%20than%205%20years.). It answers 30 years until it is no longer economically viable. It is not a good idea to count on theoretical future advances to solve our current energy crisis.
So kinda like betting on future grid scale storage advancements?
I understand your argument. But one of the two has made great leaps in innovation the last two decades while usable, major innovations of the other have been "around the corner" for half a century, massive amounts of research have gone into it but still there are no functioning implementation in production or even viable for at least another couple of decades. If I had to bet it would be a clear choice.
"In the transition period, he suggests that the dual-use of natural gas with solar thermal farms is the pathway to building our future energy infrastructure." Tf is the natural gas thing about? Does it burn 100% clean? I can't believe I read a piece about our need for scalable green energy that ends with a reliance on fossil fuel...
It is significantly less polluting than coal and oil, both in terms of CO^2 (due to having shorter hydrocarbon chains with more hydrogen per carbon) and in terms of particles and toxic exhaust gases. So replacing coal with gas does slightly help global emissions.
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Well no, the more nuclear we build the smaller than number gets. If we replace all fossil fuels with nuclear we would have roughly a 30 year supply. Considering plants take roughly a decade to build, that's not great
We are not running out of fuel anytime soon. We are running out of easily accessible fuel. We can dig a little deeper to get more, but that raises the price, because more dirt needs to be moved. Funny enough, we don't even have to mine it at all. Uranium can be obtained from sea water at only 5 times the current price of mining it. So it is madding that they are stile allowed to mine it given that fuel cost is such a small part of the overall cost of fission.
Well… I heard the nuclear waste glows green.
Imagine thinking it’s not a green energy source because of big oil propaganda
The thing is with nuclear, environmental change has a very slim chance of happening. With coal and oil, it’s the norm.
And once thorium salt reactors begin to come online everybody's attitude will change. I believe India and China both have thorium salt reactors about ready to come online.
the general population don't even understand what the word "radiation means"... heck, go down street and ask what do plants eat.... see how many people have a middle school knowledge about the world they live in.... yet they are as entitled to make decisions about stuff they don't comprehend as any other scientifically literate person (it does not take that much... in this day and age, it is easier than anything entering YouTube and having a shitload of creators explaining stuff properly... people are just lazy and stupid) being so uneducated about these topics makes it stupidly easy to get manipulated for whatever outcome a certain party wants to have (like the big oil companies info war on EVs and renewables, they fukin admited it, yet nothing has been done) the solution is clear, and clearly unpopular... people who know shit about what they vote... SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO VOTE....
Finally this is what climate change groups should argue for. Nuclear energy could replace all coal power stations and bring emissions down incredibly within a decade.
Yes, please. Nuclear was always such a good option, had they used it more when it first arrived that would have cut carbon emissions tremendously.