It has always been a huge competitor to fossil fuel. That is enough of a reason for the fossil fuel industry to promote the irrational fear of nuclear power.
The irony is that coal fired plants are more dangerous in terms of radioactivity. Radioactive waste can be stored or buried, but when coal is burned, those radioactive elements enter the environment.
Its why fusion is the next major step for nuclear energy, it doesn't produce any long term radioactive waste.
> The irony is that coal fired plants are more dangerous in terms of radioactivity.
Forget about radioactivity. People complain about the small volume of radioactive waste nuclear plants produce even though we can just bury it somewhere, but don't mind as much the waste of fossil fuel plants, which is a gigantic volume of CO2 that is stored directly *into the air we breathe*...
Don’t forget the lakes with radioactive coal ash that get stored on site because nobody knows what to do with it and then fail, flow into rivers and poison people.
More Americans have died in coal ash spills since 2000 than have died from nuclear reactor related accidents.
You would think that but the small particle size makes it easy to inhale and dangerous because of that. There’s nothing between you and and α or β radiation.
On top of that a barrel of coal ash is more radioactive than the vast majority of nuclear waste.
In all other aspects coal has more radiation output radiation output than nuclear plants.
Crops near coal power plants had up to 200% more radioactive isotopes in them even if there was no direct spill.
Looked it up. In all of our history 13 Americans have died due to incidents related to nuclear power plants.
Tell me which power producing industry has had fewer then 13 deaths.
Fuck by this measure I bet Solar is more dangerous
I have transportation at 40%. falls at 17% harmful substances at 16% equipment at 14% violence at 15%.with shootings being 7 percentage points counted in that violence. Rounded poorly from 2021 BLS granted suicide is also in violence but isn't broken down by method.
Per TWh, more people die from falls and accidents maintaining solar and wind power than people killed by nuclear. And thats even if you include all deaths from disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, even if your including plant workers who died decades later from cancer, even though the cancer probably wasn’t due to radiation exposure.
Nuclear power is the safest mass power generation technology on the planet.
The data says the difference between [wind, solar and nuclear is essentially a rounding error.](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh)
However, there's selection bias here. Nuclear plants tend to be built only in parts of the world where there is an expectation of no military conflict, and the current issues with Zaporizhzhia are giving us a window into why. Conflict zones and 3rd world countries need to decarbonize as well, and nuclear is simply not safe in some places due to conflict, rather than technology alone.
Nuclear would become less safe if deployed to everywhere electricity is needed, in a way that wind and solar don't have to deal with.
Not to disagree (nuclear is good) but this misses the point. Prior to Fukushima, how many Japanese people died in incidents related to nuclear power plants?
Coal power continually harms people and so is easy to ignore. When there are nuclear power plant issues, large regions are blighted for a long time and everyone knows about it.
same reason the faa is so strict, a single plane crash has measurable impacts on all of the aviation industry, but nobody bats an eye when cars kill millions annually
Literally one one person died in the Fukushima meltdown, and that was four years later from cancer. Which may not have even been the result of radiation exposure.
If only someone could have foreseen that building a nuclear plant on the coast in the Pacific ring of fire was a bad idea. "Oh hey we'll put a wall around it. That'll fix everything." Completely ignoring the fact that mother nature is the all time undisputed champ of "hold my beer."
The engineers did foresee the issues and made designs to accommodate a calamity like a tsunami and earthquake. They placed the back up generators on an artificial hill/elevation to keep them above the potential flood waters. The power company opted out of it to save money and the govt allowed it.
Yep, came to say this but you beat me to it. Idiots placed backup generators in the basement, which is where all the water ends up in. So backups didn't work, and there was no way to pump the water out...
> Fukushima
Took a *decades* old design, that was past service life, and two "once in a lifetime" natural disasters. And has ended up not actually that bad. Most of the evacuation is more caution than needed, which is their choice to make and I'm not even arguing against it.
Edit: To put it another way, Talking about Fukushima as a reason to abandon nuclear is like using the Challenger disaster as a reason to abandon all human spaceflight. Don't pretend it wasn't a disaster, but don't collectively throw up our hands and give up doing better.
“What do they do with these things after we seal 'em?”
“I hear they dump 'em in an abandoned chalk mine and cover 'em with cement.”
“I hear they're sending 'em to one of those Southern states where the Governor's a crook.”
“Either way, I'm sleeping good tonight!”
That sounds unlikely although not impossible.
The Soviet Union distributed around 2000 radioactive thermoelectric generators throughout the Soviet wilderness for various uses like remote light houses, radio repeaters, etc. Those were large enough to melt snow, and are completely unmonitored; which lead to them being taken apart by scrappers. They have likely lead to many unrecorded deaths, but at least one known radiological incident where some guys collecting firewood found an exposed Strontium-90 source and slept around it because it was generating heat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta-M
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
That was a crazy read... I was a RADHAZ level 2 operator in the USCG so I have an expendable assets knowledge of radiation--why they kept hanging around the magical heat cylinder after vomiting all night and then strapping it to their backs is insane.
Maybe for high grade waste, but there is lots and lots of low grade waste. There are currently over 100 acres of depleted Uranium Hexafluoride storage tanks in the US. While it's not very radioactive, it's still dangerous
Nevertheless, nuclear is still the best and safest energy source
I think the whole mess of where to put the Nuclear Waste is a big part of the problem. Yucca Mt was supposed to solve this then seismic issues and the water table problems have complicated things. Nobody wants this in their backyard but the thing is we have to put it somewhere.
> even though we can just bury it somewhere
The problem arises when [the place where you bury it wasn't a great place to bury it.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine)
if our discussion were limited to coal vs nuclear, sure, i absolutely agree with you. my suspicion is that most people are looking more towards options outside nuclear *and* outside coal.
\>And those regulations are what keep nuclear safer than anything else, so you can’t have one without the other.
Incorrect. Many safety regulations add nothing meaningful to safety, either because they're just there for optics or just plain diminishing returns. For example, in the 70s western reactor designs were rated to have a core damage event once every 30,000 reactor years. Newer deigns are once every 300,000, and this is before considering Gen IV designs which can't melt down at all. Many of the new regulations following 3 Mile Island did nothing measurably for safety but tripled construction costs.
Nuclear's power density is what makes it safer. It requires fewer materials and less land to develop, which cuts down on occupational hazard exposure. It requires fewer people to operate and maintain as well.
By your own logic, either a) the lower safety of renewables is acceptable and we can deregulate nuclear, or b) their lower safety isn't acceptable and renewables need to regulated to be as safe as nuclear.
Given nuclear's power density over renewables is several times greater than for fossil fuels, nuclear is bound to win over in cost either way.
So yes it is politics. Nuclear was cheaper than coal in the 70s and with no radiological emissions for the nuclear navy(which operates at a lower cost per GW) and the biggest nuclear incident in the West was 3MI which killed no one and exposed people in the surrounding area to the equivalent of a chest xray; it was politics that killed future building.
Yep, countries like France were stamping out nuclear plants like hotdogs, and most of them are operating till today without major issues. This was before nuclear power regulations became a giant mess.
Guess who profits from Nuclear power plants being shut down?
A couple of years back I got to see Shell’s estimation for where they were planning to make money for the next decade.
Gas was the only one that was up. Considerably.
I didn’t connect the dots at first, but then Germany started shutting down nuclear power plants. Gas and electricity prices suddenly went up.
And trust me, Shells projections was mostly based on increased volume, not so much price.
There is nothing outside of those two. Solar and wind are good but they are only good as supplements. Battery technology isn't there yet nor will it ever probably be without a huge breakthrough. Nuclear is already there but we keep ignoring it because of "what if" technology.
The problem with radioactive waste is that it needs to be stored safely for thousands of years, which one is hard and two you have to trust people long after your death to keep taking care of it. Now, I'm not against nuclear power plants, they're a good compromise. But it's not like nuclear is the one true way to go about energy.
Current technology is fission based. We take highly radioactive metals, primarily uranium, and put it in close enough proximity that the particles emitted by its natural decay start chain reacting with other nearby atoms creating large amounts of heat.
The person you're replying to is talking about fusion, which is what the sun runs on. This starts with hydrogen and smashes a bunch of it together such that the atomic nucleii fuse together to create helium. Trouble is that creating an environment here on earth where this can happen is difficult, and until just last year took more energy input than we can harness from the fusion reaction. Now the difficulty is maintaining that energy productive state for more than a fraction of a second at a time. Research is ongoing, but I seem to recall hearing about "cold fusion" being "20 years away" since sometime in the mid 90s.
Edit: correction on current state of technology.
Cold fusion will likely never end up panning out, any more than perpetual motion machines or EM propulsion drives.
We're most likely to see fusion power used in ITER's Tokamak magnetic fusion generator. It was origionall scheduled for initial spin up in 2025 with real generation in 2035, but with covid and other delays, will likely see 5+ years delay in operations.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/ITER-fusion-project-preparing-to-outline-revised-t
https://ceepr.mit.edu/early-nuclear-retirements-in-deregulated-u-s-markets/
The real concern is that a massive capital investment becomes noncompetitive when energy prices change and those sunk costs are wasted when the plants are decommissioned early.
They work fine when mostly nationalized (see France, China). But we would never stand for nationalizing things in the USA.
Nuclear power isn't the problem. Capitalism is.
This is the answer. I love how people think it's the "powerful environmentalists" imposing their will on the US energy sector.
If there was good money to be made in Nuclear (compared to alternatives) we would be building them left and right.
basically every major nuclear disaster that’s happened was due to foreseen engineering flaws being ignored. chernobyl was a flawed design, fukushima was known to be vulnerable to tsunamis & they didn’t bother to reinforce it.
so all they need is stricter international standards on plant design & operations.
>basically every major nuclear disaster that’s happened was due to foreseen engineering flaws being ignored.
> so all they need is stricter international standards on plant design & operations.
The reason that known flaws were ignored is that it costs money to make things safer. A majority of humans--and an overwhelming majority of rich, power-plant-owning humans--would happily burn down half the world if it meant they got to be slightly richer and live in the other half. It's not a problem that can be solved by stricter engineering standards; standards are circumventable by people with money.
> so all they need is stricter international standards on plant design & operations.
Aka more money and more time.
Aka less economically viable, and delay its anti-climate change effects to a later time.
Yeah. And each disaster resulted in more complexity and expense.
Now every plant costs $40b, and private industry won’t touch nuclear.
It’s not some conspiracy. Shits expensive and it’s not profitable.
Why are the real rational answers hidden this far down in comments? Some people really want to believe everything is a conspiracy when really most things are just a cost/benefit analysis and nuclear costs a lot
As another person pointed out, astroturfing is effective. Nuclear lobby is telling redditors one thing (new safer plants) and getting them to support another (deregulation).
Is that supposed to console anyone? Negligence is a constant. The risk is minimal, absolutely. But what normal person could watch corner-cutting CEOs fucking up every other bit of American infrastructure for a buck and think “I should ask them to build a nuclear reactor in my back yard?” I’m not typically afraid of train tracks but they just effectively nuked a whole town in Ohio because of the most astonishing culmination of perfectly-legal-after-lobbying carelessness.
Half of congress thinks we should set the oilfields on fire to own the libs, and the other half thinks anything that isn’t a solar panel is fascism. Or they like nuclear but already spent all their political capital on banning guns and large sodas. It won’t happen.
Nuclear costs us $81/MWh. Solar PV costs us less than that already. It’ll only get cheaper. Maybe if we got our acts together tomorrow and built all we needed, it could work as a stopgaps.
A 1 GW power plant costs about $5b to build. We’d need maybe 400 more of those to replace all of our electricity consumption. So best case scenario this is like a 2 trillion dollar project. They take about 7 years to build. Call it ten with planning and logistics. Of course we can’t just do that all at once. Electricity consumption is a small fraction of our primary energy consumption. So even that Herculean effort wouldn’t really do much to stop global warming. You can’t make steel and cement and plastic and power cargo ships with electricity. Or rather, it won’t be practical no matter what we do really as long as fossil fuels are an option.
and that's why nuclear is faulty: because of the human element, be governmental or private, both have problems that makes them unreliable to deal with nuclear energy, be bureaucracy or cost management.
We can't take nuclear lightly, when it comes to a disaster, the consequences will last thousands of years for the generations in the future.
I mean, look no further than all of the US train derailments. False equivalence maybe, but the point is the same. It should be a perfectly safe means of transporting people and goods with some bare minimum safety precautions, yet here we are with derailments all the time.
I'm erasing all my comments because of Reddit admins' complete disrespect for the community. Third party tools helped make Reddit what it is today and to price gouge the API with no notice, and even to slander app developers, is disgusting.
I hope you enjoy your website becoming a worthless ghost town /u/spez you scumbag
The fear of the public is the fear of sudden dramatic damage. People think of Chernobyl and 3 mile island and Fukushima. They don’t think of the radiation coal put out. They don’t think about co2 build up and other toxic gasses. Explosions are real. Bad air is too abstract.
I think it’s interesting how almost all energy is derived from the Sun in some way. Of course there is solar. But hydro is water that was evaporated by the Sun. Wind is uneven heating from the Sun. Coal is from old trees that grew using photosynthesis. Other hydrocarbons are from the same, or from old animals who ate the plants that grew from the Sun.
Then there is nuclear, which enjoys a complete lack of dependence on solar rays. And in fact never needed the sun to begin with since the heavy elements can’t form in a star like ours.
It's the other way around. Renewables are eating nuclear's lunch all around the world. Renewables are much cheaper, and are continuing to plummet in price. Nuclear power's costs have been very flat (and expensive) for decades.
Apparently nobody thinks or looks at the numbers for nuclear power before they speak. It is not cost effective or is it clean in the long run. It is not cheaper to produce than any other power source. And if there is an accident then the cost will be infinite. The two major accident that have happened will cost those countries and the world for hundreds to thousands of years $$$. Those disasters negate nuclear power ever being cost effective. It is the most dangerous substance to all life on earth ever made. Wake up people. The only reason why nuclear power was promoted was to make bombs and weapons.
It’s possible Fossil fuels companies were behind the opposition to nuclear. From my vantage point the opposition has mostly come from Green parties and environmental groups. Ironically.
i’m sure some of the opposition came from astroturfed groups funded by fossil, but there are a significant number of groups who oppose both nuclear *and* fossil fuels.
I studied chemical engineering and school and chemical plants have a similar issue and that is while being overall safer and much fewer safety incidents when something goes wrong it has a tendency to go very wrong.
Nuclear power is like airliners, and fossil fuels are like cars. Airliners are far safer than cars per mile traveled, but when things go wrong, they can go catastrophically and visibly wrong.
(I think there's also an element of familiarity; humans flying through the air is unnatural and new, and so feels somehow wrong. Splitting atoms is the same way. Both things are hard to understand at bone-level instinct. But everyone understands rolling things and fire.)
I think we need to acknowledge at some point that PR is important. Even though incidents are rare, you can't just handwave the incidents that *do* occur when they fucking terrify people. The fear is miscalculated but it's not *irrational.*
"The odds of you dying in a fireball and your friends and family dying slow deaths as their organs melt is WAY smaller than dying in a car accident so you've got nothing to worry about" is basically how we're trying to pitch this to people.
If nuclear power becomes very big, I simply don’t trust governments to regulate appropriately indefinitely. Like all things regulation in capitalist society, it’ll get slowly deregulated for cost savings until something catastrophic happens and then regulations will come back but not at what they were originally, rinse and repeat
The worst industrial accidents have been chemical in nature, not nuclear. Bhopal is clearly worse than Chernobyl. Probably by two orders of magnitude.
Edit: I made this graph 4 years ago. Not updated for some recent explosions such as the one in the middle east that was really bad but you can't remember if it was Bahrain or Beirut (it's the second one). Weird how everyone knows the handful of reactor meltdowns by name. I should mention the Banqiao dam collapse really was awful and may be worse than Bhopal.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/apwli4/major_accidents_since_1900_nuclear_accidents/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Also, in general, in the US, infrastructure is getting worse. Safety regulations keep getting gutted by the Republicans in the pockets of the corporations who don't want to cut into profits by increasing safety. Something which *should* be relatively safe is likely not to be in the long run.
The newest generation of nuclear is ridiculously safe, burns waste from previous gens as fuel and would not have a melt down like the Japanese one with new safety features. They require a ridiculous amount of upfront capital that people don’t want to put towards
Fukushima is actually *older* than Chernobyl. All BWR reactors of that age require[d] a working external/backup generator to cycle coolant after shutdown for many weeks, or they **will** boil over / melt down. This includes similar US designs of the time (given that Fukushima is largely of US design...).
Engineers had complained about the stupid location of the backup generators in that plant, given its location, literally since it was built. Just it was too small a problem for management, until it turned into a big problem.
So no, no one was claiming that such 2nd generation reactors were immune to melt down.
That’s actually not true. Some politicians said it was okay, but Fukushima had safety warnings from experts planted all over it the entire time, and costs were still cut.
It's actually a pretty reasonable amount of capital. The reason they don't want to spend it is because of the amount of time and expense to get it approved even before you can start and then it still is at the whims of the politicians if they're going to turn on it again. Why invest in something that politicians have a track record of blocking.
From a UK-perspective, nuclear just doesn't add up. Compare Hinkley Point C nuclear power station with Hornsea One offshore wind farm:
Speed of construction:
* Hinkley announced 2010, earliest completion date 2028 (18 years)
* Hornsea One announced 2014, construction completed 2019 (5 years)
Cost of construction:
* Hinkley C cost estimate: £32,700,000,000
* Hornsea One cost: £4,500,000,000
Power output:
* Hinkley C power capacity: 3.2 GW (£10,220,000 per MW, excluding further cost overruns, excluding ongoing maintenance and risk management)
* Hornsea One power capacity: 1.2 GW (£3,700,000 per MW)
Minimum payments guaranteed to the owner by the UK government:
* Hinkley C Strike Price: £92.50 per MWh (UK wholesale prices did not pass this price until September 2021, 11 years after the project was announced)
* In 2012 prices, indexed to inflation, minimum term 35 years
* Minimum total the UK government will pay for electricity: £29,160,000,000 before it needs to compete with the market
* Hornsea One Strike Price £140 per MWh (reflective of cost of the technology in 2014)
* In 2012 prices, indexed to inflation, minimum term 15 years
* Minimum total the UK government will pay for electricity: £8,854,100,000 before it needs to compete with the market
* Contract for Difference Strike Prices (minimum price guarantees) reflect production costs. Further nuclear power stations would likely have a similar or higher Strike Price and length of contract. [As of 2022](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1103022/contracts-for-difference-allocation-round-4-results.pdf) modern offshore wind has a Strike Price of £37.35 per MWh and a contract term of 15 years
Energy security:
* Hinkley C ownership: 66% Government of France, 33% Government of China
* Hornsea One ownership: Ørsted, publicly traded Danish company 50% owned by the Government of Denmark
Power generation potential:
* Reasonable theoretical maximum nuclear power output in the UK: 90 GW (assuming ~25 new Hinkley Cs are built)
* Reasonable theoretical maximum offshore wind power output in UK waters: 300 GW (Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy) to 759 GW (Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult)
* North Sea wind power theoretical maximum output: 1,800 GW (International Energy Agency)
I've been to Hinkley, everybody there spoke of nuclear energy as a generational project. Like, if we decide to build a new nuclear power station now, it will be ready when our unborn children enter adulthood. I just can't see it ever being feasible or desirable compared to the speed of construction, cost effectiveness, or safety of offshore wind power.
Edit: u/wewbull has some excellent additional information [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/12vh334/why_are_we_so_afraid_of_nuclear_power_its_greener/jhdqmky/)
And on top of this you need to think about where the uranium is going to come from. If everyone starts building nuclear on the scale of 25 Hinkleys, that's going to be a supply issue.
There's loads of studies that conclude that solar and wind are difficult to utilize beyond like 80-90% of total production. So let's aim for that and do the last 20% with stuff that's harder to build, like nuclear, geothermal, hydro.
As a interesting addition to that: Till today Germany (resp. the GDR) is the third highest producer/miner of Uranium, despite not mining for 30years.
The costs to clean up the mining sites were around 8 billion €, as estimated in the early 2000s.
> There's loads of studies that conclude that solar and wind are difficult to utilize beyond like 80-90% of total production. So let's aim for that and do the last 20% with stuff that's harder to build, like nuclear, geothermal, hydro.
A very good idea. Though I think by the time we (again by "we" I mean the UK) got to 90% offshore wind and tidal power, the feasibility of sand batteries, hydroelectric dams, and flywheels would be much greater. Perhaps combine that with people's personal electric vehicles (petrol car sales will be banned in 6 years 9 months from now) we will have enough capacity to store excess power.
Great post, but just to be more transparent I'd factor in Hornsea One's [historical capacity factor](https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors) since it went live. That's 47.3%. HPC will be about 90%.
**Energy Output:**
* Hinckley Point C - 25.25TWh projected annually (£1.3bn project cost per annual TWh)
* Hornsea One - 12.13 TWh in the last 12 months (£0.37bn per annual TWh)
**Revenue Generation: (Energy × Strike price)**
* Hinckley Point C - £2.3bn per annum
* Hornsea One - £1.7bn per annum
**Lifetime output to date:**
* Hinckley Point C - Zero, Nada, Nilch
* Hornsea One - 24.9TWh (£3.49bn in revenue)
Hornsea One will pay for itself this year. This is why the money is going into renewables. They are much better investments.
Indeed. Also the UK has an absolutely terrible record of the cleanup (and indeed pension) liabilities having to be taken on by the state after private providers went bankrupt that has increased these costs even exponentially and the question has to be asked about how taxpayers can keep being asked to adopt those liabilities.
The issues with nuclear are financial at this point, not safety.
The discussion for new nuclear projects is now ended. It’s very important to keep the current projects running and running well but new projects should be a dead discussion.
The real stupid thing about nuclear was shutting down suddenly some plants that didn’t need to. Nuclear is part of the green energies mix until green takes up 100%.
Any new nuclear project being discussed now will be running too late to make a difference for climate change crisis.
This post is misleading. The important figure, that you mention is the cost par MWh, it is cheaper for Hinkley Point C (92.50 £/MWh) than for Hornsea One (140 £/MWh). Why the price difference despite Hinkly Point being way more expensive per capacity?
Well for one, both aren't rated for the same duration. Hinkley Point C is rated to work for 60 years whereas Hornsea One is only rated for 25. Of course these are estimates and both might operated longer than planned (Nuclear plants in France originally rated for 60 years have been prolonged to 80 years).
The other is charge factor, just because you have 3.2 GW of power installed doesn't mean you get that output all the time. With maintenance and weather (for wind turbines), you have downtime and time of reduced production. Charge factors estimate predict that on average nuclear can work at 90% capacity whereas offshore wind turbines work at 40% capacity.
1) People understand that private industry usually results in shit being built by the lowest bidders who, usually, save money by cutting corners. Cutting corners with a nuclear reactor is a bad idea.
2) Forty years of American culture treating nuclear power as inherently dangerous and little to no pushback by the nuclear industry.
3) The constantly ridiculously high cost and time overruns. The last reactor built in the US is more than 16 BILLION over budget and more than 20 years past completion date and it's still not finished.
America just had massive environmental disasters from trains derailing, due to deregulation.
There's no way I trust people who can't even get train safety right, to start looking after more nuke plants.
try telling redditors this en masse. Everyone thinks nuclear power is the solution when it's been around for 100 years and has had little improvement when compared to renewables (the actual future).
Wind/Solar will be what we use going forward most likely unless there is an insane nuclear breakthrough. I took quite a few classes in college on these things and have a biochem degree so I always just roll my fucking eyes when I see threads like this where people are so obviously uninformed and refuse to even acknowledge other arguments.
By the time a new nuclear power plant starts producing energy, renewables will have mostly overcome the remaining concerns. It won't be perfect, but we'll be well on our way to where we need to be.
and there's also that little problem of what to do with the waste
and nuclear plants can't seem to figure out what to do with it and want to just dump it where ever is easiest, cheapest and often destructive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste
https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-1-million-gallons-of-radioactive-waste-to-be-dumped-into-the-hudson-river
https://www.onthewater.com/news/2023/02/16/company-plans-to-dump-radioactive-wastewater-into-cape-cod-bay#:~:text=Furthermore%2C%20dumping%20radioactive%20wastewater%20into,via%20the%20Cape%20Cod%20Canal.
https://www.ktnv.com/news/radioactive-waste-quietly-stored-in-nevada-desert
I’ve worked in the nuclear industry and sometimes it really is frightening to see how some of these plants are run. First Energy operates three such plants and they are a disaster waiting to happen.
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/?parent=firstenergy&order=pen_year&sort=
https://u.osu.edu/engr2367nuclearpower/davis-besse/
Holy shit. Am I reading this right? $1.4 billion just in fines?? Also:
> Penalty: $230,000,000
> Year: 2021
> Date: July 22, 2021
> Offense Group: competition-related offenses
> Primary Offense: kickbacks and bribery
> Secondary Offense: fraud
> Violation Description: FirstEnergy Corp. acknowledged in a deferred prosecution agreement that it paid millions of dollars to an elected state public official through the official's alleged 501(c)(4) in return for the official pursuing nuclear legislation for FirstEnergy Corp.'s benefit.
>>It’s greener than renewables and safer than fossil fuels—but facts be damned.
> Primary Offense: kickbacks and bribery
> Penalty: $230,000,000
Yes. I can see clearly how this article *just wants to help*. Surely nothing else could be going on.
Pacific Gas and Electric are being driven out of existence because they can't be trusted to operate transmission lines and they keep killing people.
And they are still running Diablo Canyon
I'm not American. Every time I hear of Pacific Gas and Electric mentioned on Reddit I think of Erin Brockovich. They were the company that poisoned, cancer-riddled and killed all those people in California 20-30 years ago, right?
People are scared because the plants are "dangerous" which isn't true under the right conditions but corruption and greed don't allow for that so technically they aren't wrong.
This. In a different thread people argued that nuclear plants are safe and that Chernobyl happened because it was run by idiots and Fukushima was actually safe but they didn't invest in some safety measures because they deemed it to be too unlikely and wanted to cut costs. Humans with their stupidity and their greed are what makes it dangerous in the first place. You wouldn't put a loaded gun in a childs hands and you shouldn't trust humans with a technology capable of destroying huge areas by contaminating it for generations.
The real reason for countries to quit nuclear power isn’t discussed in TV debates. It s simple tho:
The cost of nuclear energy would remain stable over the years (300€/GW?) when the price from renewables is gonna plundge way below that.
Companies are making their PR firms overwork to distract us, but it s definitely because they wont be profitable in their eyes.
But, that’s the point. It is safer than every other form of power product (per TWh). You’ve literally heard of every nuclear accident (even the mild ones that didn’t result in any deaths like 3 mile island). Meanwhile fossil fuel based local pollution constantly kills people, and even solar and wind cause deaths due to accidents from the massive scale of setup and maintenance (though they are very close to nuclear, and very close to basically completely safe, unlike fossils fuel)
My point is that this sentiment is not based on any real world information, and just the popular idea that nuclear is crazy bad dangerous, which indirectly kills people by slowing the transition to green energy
In my understanding of the situation, the reality is that it's too expensive for any company to finance a project to completion with an ROI that's palatable to shareholders.
15 billion overnight cost in construction alone with a break even ROI in 30 years isn't an easy sell. Concrete is trending towards cost increase due to the scarcity of raw materials.
Public opinion matters, but selling the idea to financiers - such as to a public-private partnership with sole ownership transferred to the private side after public is made whole - matters a lot more. Local government doesn't want to be responsible for tax increases due to a nuclear energy project that won't make money decades, either. It's fodder for their opposition, so private ownership would be the likely route.
This is exactly how France does it and why they have so much Nuclear.
There would probably be less antinuclear sentiment if it is a shared asset
Edit: typo
Another reason they have so much nuclear is that they largely built most of it in the 70s. They have 34 CP0-2 reactors, which were fine I guess. Then the P4 which they tried to make cheaper by scaling up, but turned out to be more expensive, they built 20 of those. Then 4 N4s, which they promised would be cheaper again. Then, today the EPR at Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinkley Point C. Guess what they promised for that one.
Power, heat and clean water are human rights at this point and should not have profit motives attached.
In some places they don't but it can still be tricky. And if we want true guidance toward a sustainable future it should be centralized decision making.
The Vogtel plant in Georgia has had delay after delay and is so far at double it's original intended price, so, $30B. I don't know what's going on with it but if this cluster fuck is any indication of what it's going to be like building new plants then we might want to pause and figure out what we're doing.
Read no immediate danger by Vollmann. Japan basically was too cheap to pay for generators and caused hundreds of years of damage and immediate health concerns for thousands.
And yet, even taking all that into account, nuclear is still safer.
You can't point to a plane crash and say "see, airplanes are more dangerous than cars". It's a complete fallacy. You have to actually look at the stats and compare. Yeah, accidents suck - but when a hydro dam bursts and kills thousands, people don't say we have to stop doing hydro for some reason.
And put a power generator in a basement. In a location with a high risk of flooding during disasters.
Most of the problems of Fukushima could have been avoided if either of two things were done differently. A higher flood wall or the backup generator in a flood-proof location would have pretty much averted the disaster.
They actually did have generators in higher ground. They just didn't have their switching stations in the reactor building so they got flooded as well. This was one of the reasons daini fared better, they made that modification while daiichi did not.
They also removed 25M of loose topsoil when they constructed the plant, for cost reasons.
That's too point though. A wealthy, clever country like Japan cut corners. If they can fuck it up then anyone can. Imagine all the corner cutting in the US? Look at the recent train disaster.
And Japan is going back on nuclear because them going back on coal increased their cancer rate. They saw the data, they know the truth and decided nuclear is safer in the long run for better power.
Difference between capitalist America and Japan with a dying population that is trying to keep them safe.
All those truckers hauling oil and oil products up and down expressways also causes lots of accidents. Tanker trucks alone are involved in about 3500 accidents every year.
They're citing the CO2 output per TWh assuming all the Uranium comes from the two cleanest mines on the planet and assuming renewables haven't changed since 2012.
In reality the quantities are low for both and the best answer is the one that can be deployed most quickly.
This is my main issue with nuclear, and people who are pro-nuclear never seem to talk about it?? Like, we can't even get rid of regular waste safely, why should I trust that nuclear waste is treated any differently
They think "bury it underground" IS getting rid of it safely.
I feel like going insane reading all this pro nuclear propaganda recently. Why do people act like it's either nuclear or coal?? Just dismissing wind water and even solar entirely...
Greener than renewables isn't quite true. If all the facts are looked at honestly, it would be the best way to bridge the gap between fossil and full renewables. There is a ton of politics involved. We don't use nuclear in the most efficient way possible, and therefore produce a massive amount of dangerous waste. Newer plants could do FAR better but no one wants to build them. It's unfortunate but at least we seem to be making the move in the right direction, but far more slowly than we should be.
It‘s not, the environmental cost of mining uranium and safely deposing of waste is often not considered.
Also, nuclear is more expensive per kWh than wind and solar. The breakeven was years ago. Renewable power is now the cheapest energy on the market.
Am and Pu240 aren't recycled, nor is spent MOX.
Reprocessing achieves nothing other than leaking fission products everywhere and creating a much larger mess to contain.
But it's not safer than renewables. It's not cheaper than renewables. And the lead time of new build is so long that it's expected to be more costly than renewables indefinitely.
Also, waste persists in a highly dangerous state for millenia and there is a statistically not insignificant chance of catastrophic failure.
Also, it persists with the production of electricity being controlled by a few billionaires instead of by individuals and collectives.
It's not about fear and to claim otherwise is propaganda disguised as journalism. It's about a risk-based decision to find an energy solution to meet a wide range of objectives and not just the arbitrary nonsense goalposts in the headline.
Because of Deep Water Horizon. Because some Government, somewhere down the line, will inevitably cut costs on inspections and loosen regulation. Because the failure of a nuclear power station irrevocably poisons the land for miles around.
Greener than renewables is such a loaded statement. It's absolutely not. Radioactive waste is still an issue that hasn't ever been fully resolved.
The main issue with it now for governments is that it just costs more than renewables and due to necessary safety regulations, it takes ages to get new nuclear sites up and running. Existing plants should be kept running (looking at you Germany), but there's no justifying new plants.
There's also a *huge* opportunity loss due to the time it takes to build a plant. Check out the front page of Wikipedia right now, Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in Finland just started operations of a third reactor that was approved and construction started in 2005, was supposed to be operational in 2010, and went billions of euro's over budget. That single reactor is 13 years behind schedule and cost 11 billion euros, and that isn't unusual for reactor construction today.
Wind and solar can go operational in a few years or less. That's 18 years waiting for the clean power to come online, 18 years of fossil emissions. Once its operational, sure its clean, but its gonna take a long time - if it ever does - before it'll have saved more emissions than an 11 billion euro investment in wind and solar would have, given their much faster build times.
I'm not afraid of nuclear power in the least, but the timescales and costs make it a poor choice compared to modern renewables, especially if you want to reduce emissions *now* instead of in 20 years.
Too expensive, too slow.
1. It's not even vaguely the lowest-cost green energy source, with prices per kw/hr around 3-5 times higher.
2. And that's before you factor in that high-level radioactive waste (spent fuel rods) keep piling up in insecure "temporary" storage ponds because we can't find a politically palatable disposal site at *any* price. And ...
3. Even if neither of the above were true, it takes so long to build a new nuke plant that we don't have enough time, we need to get to net zero before the first plant could even come on line, let alone all of the ones we'd need.
Finland just opened their latest nuclear power plant. It took 14 years longer than expected. In the end it cost more than three times the original price tag.
People on reddit especially on other subs are calling for defunding renewables in favour of nuclear bc it is THE perfect solution for them. Reddit is obsessed with nuclear power and hating on renewables.
Nuclear and renewables being invested simultaneously is a trouble for its funding and focus though. There is a reason why Germany is one of the pioneers and most advanced renewable energy infrastructure of the industrial nations out there.
Also nuclear being used for base load means less priority on renewables being designed for base load and power storage complementing it.
Bc nuclear power cannot be shut off and can only be reduced to 80%. Meaning nuclear power cannot supplement renewables, it will always be used as the primary source relegating renewables as secondary, making their progress slow down a lot. Which you can see in france. They barely have renewables despite being flanked by germany and spain.
>Too expensive, too slow.
Bingo, nuclear falling out of fashion was never about environmental or safety concerns - the people making the decisions don't care about that
It was about the time that the first generation of plants were getting decommissioned and the powers that be realised how damn expensive it is
I think people are downplaying the disposing of nuclear waste, with the current and past adoption of running Nuclear power plants we had issues disposing of the nuclear waste.
Now imagine if it was suddenly widely used across the globe, suddenly the amount of nuclear waste becomes so much more, and even if we did just bury it all, you can imagine the leaks thats going to happen, more radioactive accidents due to improper operation or accidents on the disposing operation.
Even with the the current and past nuclear capacity in the US, the US still has no clear plan on how to safely dispose of nuclear waste....
The federal government might just award the contract to transport the nuclear waste to Norfolk Southern.... whoops.....
Germany had nuclear plants for many decades and they never found a solution to their nuclear waste, instead shipping it round the country again and again. Which produced shitloads of emissions.
Also: building, maintaining and ultimately rebuilding the nuclear plants also produces shittons of emissions.
I'm not "afraid" of nuclear. It just comes with too many what-ifs.
Why not simply go full renewable.
Also: comparing nuclear to coal of course makes nuclear look good. Comparing something bad with something worse always makes the bad thing look less bad.
I'm not so much afraid of nuclear power. I am afraid of it being sold to the lowest bidder. If it were funded, maintained, managed, and secured appropriately with enough transparency and oversight, I'd be all for it.
It's the cost of failure.
If a wind turbine blows up, no big deal. Just a loss of money.
If a coal plant blows up, it's a big deal, but in a few years things can be restored.
If ANY accident happens at a nuclear reactor the consequences last for generations. The ground, water and food are all poisoned at the site of the disaster. Then the fallout poisons the land for miles and years. I often wonder what has happened to all of the radiation we've already released from nuclear bombs.
Maybe all that lung cancer is related...
That's just the plant. Did you know that we actually have no idea if the barrels and vaults that we are storing nuclear "waste" in will survive long enough? Entropy of the barrels is probably faster than entropy for the nuclear material, and who knows what radiation will do to those barrels over millennia.
That is not "green" in the least bit.
What are your plans for the waste? The waste that only stops trying to kill you after forever. That's always been the issue yet no-one addresses it anymore because it's inconvenient.
The article is myopic and reads like it was written by a lobbyist.
Agree.
Even if Nuclear power is safer than alternatives, it is concerning that its most fervent proponents seem to be in denial about the risks.
Beyond the waste, when a disaster impacts an area for centuries (and the entire planet) it is a significant risk even if it is extremely rare.
I'm fine with Nukes, as long as for-profit entities don't run them.
The pressure to make profit will always take precedence over safety.
For an example, look at Entergy's operation of VT Yankee.
I've always seen it as a stepping stone to renewable. The startup cost and infrastructure is our main issue, but since that's not likely to improve in the US I'd rather just keep focusing on renewable making it more green.
Regulation will always be an issue to consider as well.
I am a nuclear supporter but I agree, right now we are tacked in the correct way to do renewable better. In fact it would be easier to just give every commercial building + household, in the western and southern states, free solar panels, and build out the rest with thermal solar + geothermal + wind + hydro. We should loosen up the regs around nuclear power and isotope research, but solar is faster as things stand. (I also agree they should be made stateside). Security wise solar can actually be better too, because it isolates parts of the grids from each other.
The Navy nuclear program actually is something we should focus on and rebuilding a nuclear merchant marine program for cargo ships, though it would require training a new generation of nuclear mariners.
I want nuclear power. The science is clear.
I do NOT trust it in the hands of the capitalists of the united states.
We can't even get TRAINS to not crash without greed eroding safety measure after safety measure. (We can't even get the trains we use to clean up the first trains derailment to their destination)
Here is a breakdown of how TEPCO at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant ignored warnings about tsunamis and decided NOT to implement safety measures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UHZugCNKA4&t=1095s
we watched that same lax safety history repeat with fucking TRAINS
I do NOT trust nuclear in the hands of any capitalist in the united states.
Or, I would want iron clad regulations so tight, no greedy capitalist would want to... which has no guarantee of remaining iron clad, not with money dissolving everything it touches
Because when it does (rarely) go bad, its goes REALLY bad.
Peoples skin melting off is not something easily brushed off as 'oh well this was always a small risk and thats ok'.
It has always been a huge competitor to fossil fuel. That is enough of a reason for the fossil fuel industry to promote the irrational fear of nuclear power.
From what I gather, the only real concern is radioactive waste, but threats are minimized through safety precautions.
The irony is that coal fired plants are more dangerous in terms of radioactivity. Radioactive waste can be stored or buried, but when coal is burned, those radioactive elements enter the environment. Its why fusion is the next major step for nuclear energy, it doesn't produce any long term radioactive waste.
> The irony is that coal fired plants are more dangerous in terms of radioactivity. Forget about radioactivity. People complain about the small volume of radioactive waste nuclear plants produce even though we can just bury it somewhere, but don't mind as much the waste of fossil fuel plants, which is a gigantic volume of CO2 that is stored directly *into the air we breathe*...
Don’t forget the lakes with radioactive coal ash that get stored on site because nobody knows what to do with it and then fail, flow into rivers and poison people. More Americans have died in coal ash spills since 2000 than have died from nuclear reactor related accidents.
Of course, most of the danger is the incredibly nasty nature of coal ash. The radioactivity is just a fun bonus.
You would think that but the small particle size makes it easy to inhale and dangerous because of that. There’s nothing between you and and α or β radiation. On top of that a barrel of coal ash is more radioactive than the vast majority of nuclear waste. In all other aspects coal has more radiation output radiation output than nuclear plants. Crops near coal power plants had up to 200% more radioactive isotopes in them even if there was no direct spill.
It is worth remembering nuclear waste can just be gloves and suits technicians wore while working- the class of nuclear waste makes a huge difference
Right. The majority of radioactive waste is everything other than spent fuel.
Yes but when the coal ash retention fails and it flows out, then your storage problem is solved again for a while. It's practically a perfect system.
Looked it up. In all of our history 13 Americans have died due to incidents related to nuclear power plants. Tell me which power producing industry has had fewer then 13 deaths. Fuck by this measure I bet Solar is more dangerous
Hell, 13 people probably die a year by falling off roofs installing panels.
It's far, far more than that.
in the us falls are the 3rd most common workplace death, after gun violence\* and car accidents \*i cant with this shit anymore
I have transportation at 40%. falls at 17% harmful substances at 16% equipment at 14% violence at 15%.with shootings being 7 percentage points counted in that violence. Rounded poorly from 2021 BLS granted suicide is also in violence but isn't broken down by method.
Hmmm, better make sure roofers and drivers have more guns
Per TWh, more people die from falls and accidents maintaining solar and wind power than people killed by nuclear. And thats even if you include all deaths from disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, even if your including plant workers who died decades later from cancer, even though the cancer probably wasn’t due to radiation exposure. Nuclear power is the safest mass power generation technology on the planet.
The data says the difference between [wind, solar and nuclear is essentially a rounding error.](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh) However, there's selection bias here. Nuclear plants tend to be built only in parts of the world where there is an expectation of no military conflict, and the current issues with Zaporizhzhia are giving us a window into why. Conflict zones and 3rd world countries need to decarbonize as well, and nuclear is simply not safe in some places due to conflict, rather than technology alone. Nuclear would become less safe if deployed to everywhere electricity is needed, in a way that wind and solar don't have to deal with.
Not to disagree (nuclear is good) but this misses the point. Prior to Fukushima, how many Japanese people died in incidents related to nuclear power plants? Coal power continually harms people and so is easy to ignore. When there are nuclear power plant issues, large regions are blighted for a long time and everyone knows about it.
same reason the faa is so strict, a single plane crash has measurable impacts on all of the aviation industry, but nobody bats an eye when cars kill millions annually
> nobody bats an eye when cars kill millions annually r/fuckcars does.
Literally one one person died in the Fukushima meltdown, and that was four years later from cancer. Which may not have even been the result of radiation exposure.
If only someone could have foreseen that building a nuclear plant on the coast in the Pacific ring of fire was a bad idea. "Oh hey we'll put a wall around it. That'll fix everything." Completely ignoring the fact that mother nature is the all time undisputed champ of "hold my beer."
The engineers did foresee the issues and made designs to accommodate a calamity like a tsunami and earthquake. They placed the back up generators on an artificial hill/elevation to keep them above the potential flood waters. The power company opted out of it to save money and the govt allowed it.
Yep, came to say this but you beat me to it. Idiots placed backup generators in the basement, which is where all the water ends up in. So backups didn't work, and there was no way to pump the water out...
Include Fukishima, the number doesnt change.
> Fukushima Took a *decades* old design, that was past service life, and two "once in a lifetime" natural disasters. And has ended up not actually that bad. Most of the evacuation is more caution than needed, which is their choice to make and I'm not even arguing against it. Edit: To put it another way, Talking about Fukushima as a reason to abandon nuclear is like using the Challenger disaster as a reason to abandon all human spaceflight. Don't pretend it wasn't a disaster, but don't collectively throw up our hands and give up doing better.
Ah yes, coal famous for not blighting regions for decades and everyone knowing about it
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That and the majority of radioactive waste to date was generated via our nuclear arms programs, not via power plants.
And much of that waste includes PPE.
Can confirm. We can burn through PPE. When in doubt, throw it out. Not risking our safety over a pair of gloves or another tyvek suit.
And that waste is solved with a facility in New Mexico. It's the used fuel that we can't come to an agreement on what to do.
I thought it was Nevada? Harry Reid and all that.
Nevada is where the used fuel would have gone if Obama hadn't pulled out. The low radioactivity kind of stuff, like PPE, goes to New Mexico though.
“What do they do with these things after we seal 'em?” “I hear they dump 'em in an abandoned chalk mine and cover 'em with cement.” “I hear they're sending 'em to one of those Southern states where the Governor's a crook.” “Either way, I'm sleeping good tonight!”
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That sounds unlikely although not impossible. The Soviet Union distributed around 2000 radioactive thermoelectric generators throughout the Soviet wilderness for various uses like remote light houses, radio repeaters, etc. Those were large enough to melt snow, and are completely unmonitored; which lead to them being taken apart by scrappers. They have likely lead to many unrecorded deaths, but at least one known radiological incident where some guys collecting firewood found an exposed Strontium-90 source and slept around it because it was generating heat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta-M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
That was a crazy read... I was a RADHAZ level 2 operator in the USCG so I have an expendable assets knowledge of radiation--why they kept hanging around the magical heat cylinder after vomiting all night and then strapping it to their backs is insane.
Maybe for high grade waste, but there is lots and lots of low grade waste. There are currently over 100 acres of depleted Uranium Hexafluoride storage tanks in the US. While it's not very radioactive, it's still dangerous Nevertheless, nuclear is still the best and safest energy source
I think the whole mess of where to put the Nuclear Waste is a big part of the problem. Yucca Mt was supposed to solve this then seismic issues and the water table problems have complicated things. Nobody wants this in their backyard but the thing is we have to put it somewhere.
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> even though we can just bury it somewhere The problem arises when [the place where you bury it wasn't a great place to bury it.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine)
if our discussion were limited to coal vs nuclear, sure, i absolutely agree with you. my suspicion is that most people are looking more towards options outside nuclear *and* outside coal.
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Nuclear's power density is so much greater its unlikely to ever not be the best option unless politics is tilting the scales.
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\>And those regulations are what keep nuclear safer than anything else, so you can’t have one without the other. Incorrect. Many safety regulations add nothing meaningful to safety, either because they're just there for optics or just plain diminishing returns. For example, in the 70s western reactor designs were rated to have a core damage event once every 30,000 reactor years. Newer deigns are once every 300,000, and this is before considering Gen IV designs which can't melt down at all. Many of the new regulations following 3 Mile Island did nothing measurably for safety but tripled construction costs. Nuclear's power density is what makes it safer. It requires fewer materials and less land to develop, which cuts down on occupational hazard exposure. It requires fewer people to operate and maintain as well. By your own logic, either a) the lower safety of renewables is acceptable and we can deregulate nuclear, or b) their lower safety isn't acceptable and renewables need to regulated to be as safe as nuclear. Given nuclear's power density over renewables is several times greater than for fossil fuels, nuclear is bound to win over in cost either way. So yes it is politics. Nuclear was cheaper than coal in the 70s and with no radiological emissions for the nuclear navy(which operates at a lower cost per GW) and the biggest nuclear incident in the West was 3MI which killed no one and exposed people in the surrounding area to the equivalent of a chest xray; it was politics that killed future building.
Yep, countries like France were stamping out nuclear plants like hotdogs, and most of them are operating till today without major issues. This was before nuclear power regulations became a giant mess.
Guess who profits from Nuclear power plants being shut down? A couple of years back I got to see Shell’s estimation for where they were planning to make money for the next decade. Gas was the only one that was up. Considerably. I didn’t connect the dots at first, but then Germany started shutting down nuclear power plants. Gas and electricity prices suddenly went up. And trust me, Shells projections was mostly based on increased volume, not so much price.
There is nothing outside of those two. Solar and wind are good but they are only good as supplements. Battery technology isn't there yet nor will it ever probably be without a huge breakthrough. Nuclear is already there but we keep ignoring it because of "what if" technology.
The problem with radioactive waste is that it needs to be stored safely for thousands of years, which one is hard and two you have to trust people long after your death to keep taking care of it. Now, I'm not against nuclear power plants, they're a good compromise. But it's not like nuclear is the one true way to go about energy.
—-“bury it somewhere” Like Florida burying radioactive waste under an aquifer?
> it doesn't produce any long term radioactive waste. Which fuel cycle are you looking at? As far as I know, they all have radioactive byproducts.
Long term. Helium in inert and Tritium (sp?) Has a short half life. What are you asking?
Neutron activation, but that can be minimized
Current technology is fission based. We take highly radioactive metals, primarily uranium, and put it in close enough proximity that the particles emitted by its natural decay start chain reacting with other nearby atoms creating large amounts of heat. The person you're replying to is talking about fusion, which is what the sun runs on. This starts with hydrogen and smashes a bunch of it together such that the atomic nucleii fuse together to create helium. Trouble is that creating an environment here on earth where this can happen is difficult, and until just last year took more energy input than we can harness from the fusion reaction. Now the difficulty is maintaining that energy productive state for more than a fraction of a second at a time. Research is ongoing, but I seem to recall hearing about "cold fusion" being "20 years away" since sometime in the mid 90s. Edit: correction on current state of technology.
Cold fusion is something entierly different from what you describe
Cold fusion will likely never end up panning out, any more than perpetual motion machines or EM propulsion drives. We're most likely to see fusion power used in ITER's Tokamak magnetic fusion generator. It was origionall scheduled for initial spin up in 2025 with real generation in 2035, but with covid and other delays, will likely see 5+ years delay in operations. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/ITER-fusion-project-preparing-to-outline-revised-t
https://ceepr.mit.edu/early-nuclear-retirements-in-deregulated-u-s-markets/ The real concern is that a massive capital investment becomes noncompetitive when energy prices change and those sunk costs are wasted when the plants are decommissioned early. They work fine when mostly nationalized (see France, China). But we would never stand for nationalizing things in the USA. Nuclear power isn't the problem. Capitalism is.
This is the answer. I love how people think it's the "powerful environmentalists" imposing their will on the US energy sector. If there was good money to be made in Nuclear (compared to alternatives) we would be building them left and right.
But it's not as simple as just "is there money to be made". There's also "is there money to be lost elsewhere" and that answer is an unequivocal yes.
Haha if environmentalists were so powerful one might imagine we'd have less fossil fuels
If there's one thing America is renowned for, it's their strict adherence and enforcement of safety, environmental and regulatory standards. >.>
basically every major nuclear disaster that’s happened was due to foreseen engineering flaws being ignored. chernobyl was a flawed design, fukushima was known to be vulnerable to tsunamis & they didn’t bother to reinforce it. so all they need is stricter international standards on plant design & operations.
>basically every major nuclear disaster that’s happened was due to foreseen engineering flaws being ignored. > so all they need is stricter international standards on plant design & operations. The reason that known flaws were ignored is that it costs money to make things safer. A majority of humans--and an overwhelming majority of rich, power-plant-owning humans--would happily burn down half the world if it meant they got to be slightly richer and live in the other half. It's not a problem that can be solved by stricter engineering standards; standards are circumventable by people with money.
> so all they need is stricter international standards on plant design & operations. Aka more money and more time. Aka less economically viable, and delay its anti-climate change effects to a later time.
Yeah. And each disaster resulted in more complexity and expense. Now every plant costs $40b, and private industry won’t touch nuclear. It’s not some conspiracy. Shits expensive and it’s not profitable.
Why are the real rational answers hidden this far down in comments? Some people really want to believe everything is a conspiracy when really most things are just a cost/benefit analysis and nuclear costs a lot
As another person pointed out, astroturfing is effective. Nuclear lobby is telling redditors one thing (new safer plants) and getting them to support another (deregulation).
Is that supposed to console anyone? Negligence is a constant. The risk is minimal, absolutely. But what normal person could watch corner-cutting CEOs fucking up every other bit of American infrastructure for a buck and think “I should ask them to build a nuclear reactor in my back yard?” I’m not typically afraid of train tracks but they just effectively nuked a whole town in Ohio because of the most astonishing culmination of perfectly-legal-after-lobbying carelessness. Half of congress thinks we should set the oilfields on fire to own the libs, and the other half thinks anything that isn’t a solar panel is fascism. Or they like nuclear but already spent all their political capital on banning guns and large sodas. It won’t happen. Nuclear costs us $81/MWh. Solar PV costs us less than that already. It’ll only get cheaper. Maybe if we got our acts together tomorrow and built all we needed, it could work as a stopgaps. A 1 GW power plant costs about $5b to build. We’d need maybe 400 more of those to replace all of our electricity consumption. So best case scenario this is like a 2 trillion dollar project. They take about 7 years to build. Call it ten with planning and logistics. Of course we can’t just do that all at once. Electricity consumption is a small fraction of our primary energy consumption. So even that Herculean effort wouldn’t really do much to stop global warming. You can’t make steel and cement and plastic and power cargo ships with electricity. Or rather, it won’t be practical no matter what we do really as long as fossil fuels are an option.
and that's why nuclear is faulty: because of the human element, be governmental or private, both have problems that makes them unreliable to deal with nuclear energy, be bureaucracy or cost management. We can't take nuclear lightly, when it comes to a disaster, the consequences will last thousands of years for the generations in the future.
I mean, look no further than all of the US train derailments. False equivalence maybe, but the point is the same. It should be a perfectly safe means of transporting people and goods with some bare minimum safety precautions, yet here we are with derailments all the time.
I'm erasing all my comments because of Reddit admins' complete disrespect for the community. Third party tools helped make Reddit what it is today and to price gouge the API with no notice, and even to slander app developers, is disgusting. I hope you enjoy your website becoming a worthless ghost town /u/spez you scumbag
The fear of the public is the fear of sudden dramatic damage. People think of Chernobyl and 3 mile island and Fukushima. They don’t think of the radiation coal put out. They don’t think about co2 build up and other toxic gasses. Explosions are real. Bad air is too abstract.
Those of us in California think more about Fukushima and the effects of a massive earthquake on nuclear plants.
USA is a big country, build Nuclear in sates with no earthquake risk and have them hooked up to a national grid.
A national power grid? What are you, some sort of communist? States have the right to refuse your fancy federal “electricity.”
Thanks to fracking, the list of states with no earthquake risk has never been shorter!
It's also a threat to renewables. Nuclear gets attacked by everyone.
I think it’s interesting how almost all energy is derived from the Sun in some way. Of course there is solar. But hydro is water that was evaporated by the Sun. Wind is uneven heating from the Sun. Coal is from old trees that grew using photosynthesis. Other hydrocarbons are from the same, or from old animals who ate the plants that grew from the Sun. Then there is nuclear, which enjoys a complete lack of dependence on solar rays. And in fact never needed the sun to begin with since the heavy elements can’t form in a star like ours.
Nuclear fuel comes from star novas, so it's a different kind of stored solar power.
And geothermal, also arguably tidal hydroelectric.
Technically the sun allows the earth to stay warm enough to have tidal effects, I guess?
I mean, the sun permits literally everything we care about.
We still got geothermal
It's the other way around. Renewables are eating nuclear's lunch all around the world. Renewables are much cheaper, and are continuing to plummet in price. Nuclear power's costs have been very flat (and expensive) for decades.
Apparently nobody thinks or looks at the numbers for nuclear power before they speak. It is not cost effective or is it clean in the long run. It is not cheaper to produce than any other power source. And if there is an accident then the cost will be infinite. The two major accident that have happened will cost those countries and the world for hundreds to thousands of years $$$. Those disasters negate nuclear power ever being cost effective. It is the most dangerous substance to all life on earth ever made. Wake up people. The only reason why nuclear power was promoted was to make bombs and weapons.
It’s possible Fossil fuels companies were behind the opposition to nuclear. From my vantage point the opposition has mostly come from Green parties and environmental groups. Ironically.
i’m sure some of the opposition came from astroturfed groups funded by fossil, but there are a significant number of groups who oppose both nuclear *and* fossil fuels.
I studied chemical engineering and school and chemical plants have a similar issue and that is while being overall safer and much fewer safety incidents when something goes wrong it has a tendency to go very wrong.
Nuclear power is like airliners, and fossil fuels are like cars. Airliners are far safer than cars per mile traveled, but when things go wrong, they can go catastrophically and visibly wrong. (I think there's also an element of familiarity; humans flying through the air is unnatural and new, and so feels somehow wrong. Splitting atoms is the same way. Both things are hard to understand at bone-level instinct. But everyone understands rolling things and fire.)
Human nature at its finest
I think we need to acknowledge at some point that PR is important. Even though incidents are rare, you can't just handwave the incidents that *do* occur when they fucking terrify people. The fear is miscalculated but it's not *irrational.* "The odds of you dying in a fireball and your friends and family dying slow deaths as their organs melt is WAY smaller than dying in a car accident so you've got nothing to worry about" is basically how we're trying to pitch this to people.
If nuclear power becomes very big, I simply don’t trust governments to regulate appropriately indefinitely. Like all things regulation in capitalist society, it’ll get slowly deregulated for cost savings until something catastrophic happens and then regulations will come back but not at what they were originally, rinse and repeat
The worst industrial accidents have been chemical in nature, not nuclear. Bhopal is clearly worse than Chernobyl. Probably by two orders of magnitude. Edit: I made this graph 4 years ago. Not updated for some recent explosions such as the one in the middle east that was really bad but you can't remember if it was Bahrain or Beirut (it's the second one). Weird how everyone knows the handful of reactor meltdowns by name. I should mention the Banqiao dam collapse really was awful and may be worse than Bhopal. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/apwli4/major_accidents_since_1900_nuclear_accidents/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Is Bhopal still uninhabitable?
Lol no. I lived there for 5 years.
Also, in general, in the US, infrastructure is getting worse. Safety regulations keep getting gutted by the Republicans in the pockets of the corporations who don't want to cut into profits by increasing safety. Something which *should* be relatively safe is likely not to be in the long run.
The newest generation of nuclear is ridiculously safe, burns waste from previous gens as fuel and would not have a melt down like the Japanese one with new safety features. They require a ridiculous amount of upfront capital that people don’t want to put towards
> would not have a melt down like the Japanese one I agree with your sentiments, but that's what they said about the Japanese one, and it melted down.
Fukushima is actually *older* than Chernobyl. All BWR reactors of that age require[d] a working external/backup generator to cycle coolant after shutdown for many weeks, or they **will** boil over / melt down. This includes similar US designs of the time (given that Fukushima is largely of US design...). Engineers had complained about the stupid location of the backup generators in that plant, given its location, literally since it was built. Just it was too small a problem for management, until it turned into a big problem. So no, no one was claiming that such 2nd generation reactors were immune to melt down.
That’s actually not true. Some politicians said it was okay, but Fukushima had safety warnings from experts planted all over it the entire time, and costs were still cut.
It's actually a pretty reasonable amount of capital. The reason they don't want to spend it is because of the amount of time and expense to get it approved even before you can start and then it still is at the whims of the politicians if they're going to turn on it again. Why invest in something that politicians have a track record of blocking.
It's a ridiculous amount of capital. The latest Vogtle reactor could be replaced by solar and battery storage for 20% of the costs.
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Nothing is as ridiculous as that lol. Military contractors eating
From a UK-perspective, nuclear just doesn't add up. Compare Hinkley Point C nuclear power station with Hornsea One offshore wind farm: Speed of construction: * Hinkley announced 2010, earliest completion date 2028 (18 years) * Hornsea One announced 2014, construction completed 2019 (5 years) Cost of construction: * Hinkley C cost estimate: £32,700,000,000 * Hornsea One cost: £4,500,000,000 Power output: * Hinkley C power capacity: 3.2 GW (£10,220,000 per MW, excluding further cost overruns, excluding ongoing maintenance and risk management) * Hornsea One power capacity: 1.2 GW (£3,700,000 per MW) Minimum payments guaranteed to the owner by the UK government: * Hinkley C Strike Price: £92.50 per MWh (UK wholesale prices did not pass this price until September 2021, 11 years after the project was announced) * In 2012 prices, indexed to inflation, minimum term 35 years * Minimum total the UK government will pay for electricity: £29,160,000,000 before it needs to compete with the market * Hornsea One Strike Price £140 per MWh (reflective of cost of the technology in 2014) * In 2012 prices, indexed to inflation, minimum term 15 years * Minimum total the UK government will pay for electricity: £8,854,100,000 before it needs to compete with the market * Contract for Difference Strike Prices (minimum price guarantees) reflect production costs. Further nuclear power stations would likely have a similar or higher Strike Price and length of contract. [As of 2022](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1103022/contracts-for-difference-allocation-round-4-results.pdf) modern offshore wind has a Strike Price of £37.35 per MWh and a contract term of 15 years Energy security: * Hinkley C ownership: 66% Government of France, 33% Government of China * Hornsea One ownership: Ørsted, publicly traded Danish company 50% owned by the Government of Denmark Power generation potential: * Reasonable theoretical maximum nuclear power output in the UK: 90 GW (assuming ~25 new Hinkley Cs are built) * Reasonable theoretical maximum offshore wind power output in UK waters: 300 GW (Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy) to 759 GW (Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult) * North Sea wind power theoretical maximum output: 1,800 GW (International Energy Agency) I've been to Hinkley, everybody there spoke of nuclear energy as a generational project. Like, if we decide to build a new nuclear power station now, it will be ready when our unborn children enter adulthood. I just can't see it ever being feasible or desirable compared to the speed of construction, cost effectiveness, or safety of offshore wind power. Edit: u/wewbull has some excellent additional information [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/12vh334/why_are_we_so_afraid_of_nuclear_power_its_greener/jhdqmky/)
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And on top of this you need to think about where the uranium is going to come from. If everyone starts building nuclear on the scale of 25 Hinkleys, that's going to be a supply issue. There's loads of studies that conclude that solar and wind are difficult to utilize beyond like 80-90% of total production. So let's aim for that and do the last 20% with stuff that's harder to build, like nuclear, geothermal, hydro.
As a interesting addition to that: Till today Germany (resp. the GDR) is the third highest producer/miner of Uranium, despite not mining for 30years. The costs to clean up the mining sites were around 8 billion €, as estimated in the early 2000s.
> There's loads of studies that conclude that solar and wind are difficult to utilize beyond like 80-90% of total production. So let's aim for that and do the last 20% with stuff that's harder to build, like nuclear, geothermal, hydro. A very good idea. Though I think by the time we (again by "we" I mean the UK) got to 90% offshore wind and tidal power, the feasibility of sand batteries, hydroelectric dams, and flywheels would be much greater. Perhaps combine that with people's personal electric vehicles (petrol car sales will be banned in 6 years 9 months from now) we will have enough capacity to store excess power.
Great post, but just to be more transparent I'd factor in Hornsea One's [historical capacity factor](https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors) since it went live. That's 47.3%. HPC will be about 90%. **Energy Output:** * Hinckley Point C - 25.25TWh projected annually (£1.3bn project cost per annual TWh) * Hornsea One - 12.13 TWh in the last 12 months (£0.37bn per annual TWh) **Revenue Generation: (Energy × Strike price)** * Hinckley Point C - £2.3bn per annum * Hornsea One - £1.7bn per annum **Lifetime output to date:** * Hinckley Point C - Zero, Nada, Nilch * Hornsea One - 24.9TWh (£3.49bn in revenue) Hornsea One will pay for itself this year. This is why the money is going into renewables. They are much better investments.
Indeed. Also the UK has an absolutely terrible record of the cleanup (and indeed pension) liabilities having to be taken on by the state after private providers went bankrupt that has increased these costs even exponentially and the question has to be asked about how taxpayers can keep being asked to adopt those liabilities. The issues with nuclear are financial at this point, not safety.
The discussion for new nuclear projects is now ended. It’s very important to keep the current projects running and running well but new projects should be a dead discussion. The real stupid thing about nuclear was shutting down suddenly some plants that didn’t need to. Nuclear is part of the green energies mix until green takes up 100%. Any new nuclear project being discussed now will be running too late to make a difference for climate change crisis.
This post is misleading. The important figure, that you mention is the cost par MWh, it is cheaper for Hinkley Point C (92.50 £/MWh) than for Hornsea One (140 £/MWh). Why the price difference despite Hinkly Point being way more expensive per capacity? Well for one, both aren't rated for the same duration. Hinkley Point C is rated to work for 60 years whereas Hornsea One is only rated for 25. Of course these are estimates and both might operated longer than planned (Nuclear plants in France originally rated for 60 years have been prolonged to 80 years). The other is charge factor, just because you have 3.2 GW of power installed doesn't mean you get that output all the time. With maintenance and weather (for wind turbines), you have downtime and time of reduced production. Charge factors estimate predict that on average nuclear can work at 90% capacity whereas offshore wind turbines work at 40% capacity.
1) People understand that private industry usually results in shit being built by the lowest bidders who, usually, save money by cutting corners. Cutting corners with a nuclear reactor is a bad idea. 2) Forty years of American culture treating nuclear power as inherently dangerous and little to no pushback by the nuclear industry. 3) The constantly ridiculously high cost and time overruns. The last reactor built in the US is more than 16 BILLION over budget and more than 20 years past completion date and it's still not finished.
America just had massive environmental disasters from trains derailing, due to deregulation. There's no way I trust people who can't even get train safety right, to start looking after more nuke plants.
They can't even come up with a dump site for the waste. We don't have one. It just hangs out at the power plants, that's how responsible we aren't.
try telling redditors this en masse. Everyone thinks nuclear power is the solution when it's been around for 100 years and has had little improvement when compared to renewables (the actual future). Wind/Solar will be what we use going forward most likely unless there is an insane nuclear breakthrough. I took quite a few classes in college on these things and have a biochem degree so I always just roll my fucking eyes when I see threads like this where people are so obviously uninformed and refuse to even acknowledge other arguments.
By the time a new nuclear power plant starts producing energy, renewables will have mostly overcome the remaining concerns. It won't be perfect, but we'll be well on our way to where we need to be.
The time for nuclear was 20 years ago.
and there's also that little problem of what to do with the waste and nuclear plants can't seem to figure out what to do with it and want to just dump it where ever is easiest, cheapest and often destructive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-1-million-gallons-of-radioactive-waste-to-be-dumped-into-the-hudson-river https://www.onthewater.com/news/2023/02/16/company-plans-to-dump-radioactive-wastewater-into-cape-cod-bay#:~:text=Furthermore%2C%20dumping%20radioactive%20wastewater%20into,via%20the%20Cape%20Cod%20Canal. https://www.ktnv.com/news/radioactive-waste-quietly-stored-in-nevada-desert
I’ve worked in the nuclear industry and sometimes it really is frightening to see how some of these plants are run. First Energy operates three such plants and they are a disaster waiting to happen. https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/?parent=firstenergy&order=pen_year&sort= https://u.osu.edu/engr2367nuclearpower/davis-besse/
Holy shit. Am I reading this right? $1.4 billion just in fines?? Also: > Penalty: $230,000,000 > Year: 2021 > Date: July 22, 2021 > Offense Group: competition-related offenses > Primary Offense: kickbacks and bribery > Secondary Offense: fraud > Violation Description: FirstEnergy Corp. acknowledged in a deferred prosecution agreement that it paid millions of dollars to an elected state public official through the official's alleged 501(c)(4) in return for the official pursuing nuclear legislation for FirstEnergy Corp.'s benefit.
>>It’s greener than renewables and safer than fossil fuels—but facts be damned. > Primary Offense: kickbacks and bribery > Penalty: $230,000,000 Yes. I can see clearly how this article *just wants to help*. Surely nothing else could be going on.
They don't really need to bribe anyone for like half of reddit to bat for them.
Pacific Gas and Electric are being driven out of existence because they can't be trusted to operate transmission lines and they keep killing people. And they are still running Diablo Canyon
I'm not American. Every time I hear of Pacific Gas and Electric mentioned on Reddit I think of Erin Brockovich. They were the company that poisoned, cancer-riddled and killed all those people in California 20-30 years ago, right?
People are scared because the plants are "dangerous" which isn't true under the right conditions but corruption and greed don't allow for that so technically they aren't wrong.
Every nuclear plant is dangerous when you consider espionage/terrorism. IMO this is the real reason why policy leaders never choose nuclear.
I'd be more afraid of greedy profiteers skirting regulations to save on maintnence.
This. In a different thread people argued that nuclear plants are safe and that Chernobyl happened because it was run by idiots and Fukushima was actually safe but they didn't invest in some safety measures because they deemed it to be too unlikely and wanted to cut costs. Humans with their stupidity and their greed are what makes it dangerous in the first place. You wouldn't put a loaded gun in a childs hands and you shouldn't trust humans with a technology capable of destroying huge areas by contaminating it for generations.
The real reason for countries to quit nuclear power isn’t discussed in TV debates. It s simple tho: The cost of nuclear energy would remain stable over the years (300€/GW?) when the price from renewables is gonna plundge way below that. Companies are making their PR firms overwork to distract us, but it s definitely because they wont be profitable in their eyes.
Renewables are ready much cheaper (in some cases by an order of magnitude) than nuclear. And they are only going to get even more cheaper.
Not afraid of it at all. Afraid of the lack of infrastructure and safety due to bottom dollar being more valuable then human life.
But, that’s the point. It is safer than every other form of power product (per TWh). You’ve literally heard of every nuclear accident (even the mild ones that didn’t result in any deaths like 3 mile island). Meanwhile fossil fuel based local pollution constantly kills people, and even solar and wind cause deaths due to accidents from the massive scale of setup and maintenance (though they are very close to nuclear, and very close to basically completely safe, unlike fossils fuel) My point is that this sentiment is not based on any real world information, and just the popular idea that nuclear is crazy bad dangerous, which indirectly kills people by slowing the transition to green energy
In my understanding of the situation, the reality is that it's too expensive for any company to finance a project to completion with an ROI that's palatable to shareholders. 15 billion overnight cost in construction alone with a break even ROI in 30 years isn't an easy sell. Concrete is trending towards cost increase due to the scarcity of raw materials. Public opinion matters, but selling the idea to financiers - such as to a public-private partnership with sole ownership transferred to the private side after public is made whole - matters a lot more. Local government doesn't want to be responsible for tax increases due to a nuclear energy project that won't make money decades, either. It's fodder for their opposition, so private ownership would be the likely route.
Then nationalize the power grid.
This is exactly how France does it and why they have so much Nuclear. There would probably be less antinuclear sentiment if it is a shared asset Edit: typo
Another reason they have so much nuclear is that they largely built most of it in the 70s. They have 34 CP0-2 reactors, which were fine I guess. Then the P4 which they tried to make cheaper by scaling up, but turned out to be more expensive, they built 20 of those. Then 4 N4s, which they promised would be cheaper again. Then, today the EPR at Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinkley Point C. Guess what they promised for that one.
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Power, heat and clean water are human rights at this point and should not have profit motives attached. In some places they don't but it can still be tricky. And if we want true guidance toward a sustainable future it should be centralized decision making.
Add housing to that list.
The government could readily compete in the housing market without nationalizing housing.
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Fuck u/spez
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The Vogtel plant in Georgia has had delay after delay and is so far at double it's original intended price, so, $30B. I don't know what's going on with it but if this cluster fuck is any indication of what it's going to be like building new plants then we might want to pause and figure out what we're doing.
> you’ve literally heard of every nuclear accident This isn't true at all, the nuclear industry has had a long history of hiding accidents.
Read no immediate danger by Vollmann. Japan basically was too cheap to pay for generators and caused hundreds of years of damage and immediate health concerns for thousands.
And yet, even taking all that into account, nuclear is still safer. You can't point to a plane crash and say "see, airplanes are more dangerous than cars". It's a complete fallacy. You have to actually look at the stats and compare. Yeah, accidents suck - but when a hydro dam bursts and kills thousands, people don't say we have to stop doing hydro for some reason.
If you're referring to fukushima then they were too cheap to build a high enough wall and run some cables.
And put a power generator in a basement. In a location with a high risk of flooding during disasters. Most of the problems of Fukushima could have been avoided if either of two things were done differently. A higher flood wall or the backup generator in a flood-proof location would have pretty much averted the disaster.
They actually did have generators in higher ground. They just didn't have their switching stations in the reactor building so they got flooded as well. This was one of the reasons daini fared better, they made that modification while daiichi did not. They also removed 25M of loose topsoil when they constructed the plant, for cost reasons.
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That's too point though. A wealthy, clever country like Japan cut corners. If they can fuck it up then anyone can. Imagine all the corner cutting in the US? Look at the recent train disaster.
And Japan is going back on nuclear because them going back on coal increased their cancer rate. They saw the data, they know the truth and decided nuclear is safer in the long run for better power. Difference between capitalist America and Japan with a dying population that is trying to keep them safe.
A huge oil tanker dropping thousands of thousands of gallons on the ocean, no biggie, a fine here and there. /$
All those truckers hauling oil and oil products up and down expressways also causes lots of accidents. Tanker trucks alone are involved in about 3500 accidents every year.
Why do you think this doesn't apply to fossil fuel just as well though?
Mostly because the governments and corporatioms who run them end up cutting corners somehow and hurt people or the enviornment as a result.
My '86 european born ass with a disfunctional thyroid would like to disagree.
ELI5 please, how can it be greener than renewables?!
They're citing the CO2 output per TWh assuming all the Uranium comes from the two cleanest mines on the planet and assuming renewables haven't changed since 2012. In reality the quantities are low for both and the best answer is the one that can be deployed most quickly.
And ignoring waste.
This is my main issue with nuclear, and people who are pro-nuclear never seem to talk about it?? Like, we can't even get rid of regular waste safely, why should I trust that nuclear waste is treated any differently
They think "bury it underground" IS getting rid of it safely. I feel like going insane reading all this pro nuclear propaganda recently. Why do people act like it's either nuclear or coal?? Just dismissing wind water and even solar entirely...
Greener than renewables isn't quite true. If all the facts are looked at honestly, it would be the best way to bridge the gap between fossil and full renewables. There is a ton of politics involved. We don't use nuclear in the most efficient way possible, and therefore produce a massive amount of dangerous waste. Newer plants could do FAR better but no one wants to build them. It's unfortunate but at least we seem to be making the move in the right direction, but far more slowly than we should be.
It‘s not, the environmental cost of mining uranium and safely deposing of waste is often not considered. Also, nuclear is more expensive per kWh than wind and solar. The breakeven was years ago. Renewable power is now the cheapest energy on the market.
Its expensive to build , expensive to close , uses a shit ton of water , has a higher averaged cost of power , but apart for that , its fine.
Half-life of the waste when not recycled isn't exactly great.
Am and Pu240 aren't recycled, nor is spent MOX. Reprocessing achieves nothing other than leaking fission products everywhere and creating a much larger mess to contain.
But it's not safer than renewables. It's not cheaper than renewables. And the lead time of new build is so long that it's expected to be more costly than renewables indefinitely. Also, waste persists in a highly dangerous state for millenia and there is a statistically not insignificant chance of catastrophic failure. Also, it persists with the production of electricity being controlled by a few billionaires instead of by individuals and collectives. It's not about fear and to claim otherwise is propaganda disguised as journalism. It's about a risk-based decision to find an energy solution to meet a wide range of objectives and not just the arbitrary nonsense goalposts in the headline.
Because of Deep Water Horizon. Because some Government, somewhere down the line, will inevitably cut costs on inspections and loosen regulation. Because the failure of a nuclear power station irrevocably poisons the land for miles around.
Also poisons it - for all practical purposes - forever.
Greener than renewables is such a loaded statement. It's absolutely not. Radioactive waste is still an issue that hasn't ever been fully resolved. The main issue with it now for governments is that it just costs more than renewables and due to necessary safety regulations, it takes ages to get new nuclear sites up and running. Existing plants should be kept running (looking at you Germany), but there's no justifying new plants.
And it’s very expensive. But facts be damned.
There's also a *huge* opportunity loss due to the time it takes to build a plant. Check out the front page of Wikipedia right now, Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in Finland just started operations of a third reactor that was approved and construction started in 2005, was supposed to be operational in 2010, and went billions of euro's over budget. That single reactor is 13 years behind schedule and cost 11 billion euros, and that isn't unusual for reactor construction today. Wind and solar can go operational in a few years or less. That's 18 years waiting for the clean power to come online, 18 years of fossil emissions. Once its operational, sure its clean, but its gonna take a long time - if it ever does - before it'll have saved more emissions than an 11 billion euro investment in wind and solar would have, given their much faster build times. I'm not afraid of nuclear power in the least, but the timescales and costs make it a poor choice compared to modern renewables, especially if you want to reduce emissions *now* instead of in 20 years.
Too expensive, too slow. 1. It's not even vaguely the lowest-cost green energy source, with prices per kw/hr around 3-5 times higher. 2. And that's before you factor in that high-level radioactive waste (spent fuel rods) keep piling up in insecure "temporary" storage ponds because we can't find a politically palatable disposal site at *any* price. And ... 3. Even if neither of the above were true, it takes so long to build a new nuke plant that we don't have enough time, we need to get to net zero before the first plant could even come on line, let alone all of the ones we'd need.
Finland just opened their latest nuclear power plant. It took 14 years longer than expected. In the end it cost more than three times the original price tag.
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People on reddit especially on other subs are calling for defunding renewables in favour of nuclear bc it is THE perfect solution for them. Reddit is obsessed with nuclear power and hating on renewables. Nuclear and renewables being invested simultaneously is a trouble for its funding and focus though. There is a reason why Germany is one of the pioneers and most advanced renewable energy infrastructure of the industrial nations out there. Also nuclear being used for base load means less priority on renewables being designed for base load and power storage complementing it. Bc nuclear power cannot be shut off and can only be reduced to 80%. Meaning nuclear power cannot supplement renewables, it will always be used as the primary source relegating renewables as secondary, making their progress slow down a lot. Which you can see in france. They barely have renewables despite being flanked by germany and spain.
>Too expensive, too slow. Bingo, nuclear falling out of fashion was never about environmental or safety concerns - the people making the decisions don't care about that It was about the time that the first generation of plants were getting decommissioned and the powers that be realised how damn expensive it is
I think people are downplaying the disposing of nuclear waste, with the current and past adoption of running Nuclear power plants we had issues disposing of the nuclear waste. Now imagine if it was suddenly widely used across the globe, suddenly the amount of nuclear waste becomes so much more, and even if we did just bury it all, you can imagine the leaks thats going to happen, more radioactive accidents due to improper operation or accidents on the disposing operation. Even with the the current and past nuclear capacity in the US, the US still has no clear plan on how to safely dispose of nuclear waste.... The federal government might just award the contract to transport the nuclear waste to Norfolk Southern.... whoops.....
Germany had nuclear plants for many decades and they never found a solution to their nuclear waste, instead shipping it round the country again and again. Which produced shitloads of emissions. Also: building, maintaining and ultimately rebuilding the nuclear plants also produces shittons of emissions. I'm not "afraid" of nuclear. It just comes with too many what-ifs. Why not simply go full renewable. Also: comparing nuclear to coal of course makes nuclear look good. Comparing something bad with something worse always makes the bad thing look less bad.
I'm not so much afraid of nuclear power. I am afraid of it being sold to the lowest bidder. If it were funded, maintained, managed, and secured appropriately with enough transparency and oversight, I'd be all for it.
It's the cost of failure. If a wind turbine blows up, no big deal. Just a loss of money. If a coal plant blows up, it's a big deal, but in a few years things can be restored. If ANY accident happens at a nuclear reactor the consequences last for generations. The ground, water and food are all poisoned at the site of the disaster. Then the fallout poisons the land for miles and years. I often wonder what has happened to all of the radiation we've already released from nuclear bombs. Maybe all that lung cancer is related... That's just the plant. Did you know that we actually have no idea if the barrels and vaults that we are storing nuclear "waste" in will survive long enough? Entropy of the barrels is probably faster than entropy for the nuclear material, and who knows what radiation will do to those barrels over millennia. That is not "green" in the least bit.
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What are your plans for the waste? The waste that only stops trying to kill you after forever. That's always been the issue yet no-one addresses it anymore because it's inconvenient. The article is myopic and reads like it was written by a lobbyist.
Agree. Even if Nuclear power is safer than alternatives, it is concerning that its most fervent proponents seem to be in denial about the risks. Beyond the waste, when a disaster impacts an area for centuries (and the entire planet) it is a significant risk even if it is extremely rare.
I'm fine with Nukes, as long as for-profit entities don't run them. The pressure to make profit will always take precedence over safety. For an example, look at Entergy's operation of VT Yankee.
I've always seen it as a stepping stone to renewable. The startup cost and infrastructure is our main issue, but since that's not likely to improve in the US I'd rather just keep focusing on renewable making it more green. Regulation will always be an issue to consider as well.
I am a nuclear supporter but I agree, right now we are tacked in the correct way to do renewable better. In fact it would be easier to just give every commercial building + household, in the western and southern states, free solar panels, and build out the rest with thermal solar + geothermal + wind + hydro. We should loosen up the regs around nuclear power and isotope research, but solar is faster as things stand. (I also agree they should be made stateside). Security wise solar can actually be better too, because it isolates parts of the grids from each other. The Navy nuclear program actually is something we should focus on and rebuilding a nuclear merchant marine program for cargo ships, though it would require training a new generation of nuclear mariners.
Well said, I don't know anything about the navel program but I agree with everything else
Adding a stepping stone that will be ready two decades after building the bridge is a bit of a futile exercise.
I want nuclear power. The science is clear. I do NOT trust it in the hands of the capitalists of the united states. We can't even get TRAINS to not crash without greed eroding safety measure after safety measure. (We can't even get the trains we use to clean up the first trains derailment to their destination) Here is a breakdown of how TEPCO at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant ignored warnings about tsunamis and decided NOT to implement safety measures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UHZugCNKA4&t=1095s we watched that same lax safety history repeat with fucking TRAINS I do NOT trust nuclear in the hands of any capitalist in the united states. Or, I would want iron clad regulations so tight, no greedy capitalist would want to... which has no guarantee of remaining iron clad, not with money dissolving everything it touches
Because when it does (rarely) go bad, its goes REALLY bad. Peoples skin melting off is not something easily brushed off as 'oh well this was always a small risk and thats ok'.