Regardless of what you think about new nuclear's potential, we need to protect and upgrade (and possibly even resurrect recently-mothballed) existing nuclear power plants.
"Oh, we're going to replace that nuclear power plant with wind and solar!"
Oh, really?
Are you going to do that AFTER phasing out fossil fuel plants or BEFORE? Because if it's before, you're making the case that climate change is a lower priority than retiring the cleanest and one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed. Because you could ALWAYS choose to just replace those fossil power plants with wind and solar and batteries instead, but you're making the decision to keep that fossil fuel plant running longer than it needs to.
Similar argument for getting rid of existing hydroelectric dams.
And I'm talking about long existing plants, here. All those cement emissions (and reservoir emissions for hydro) already happened and were "paid for." We need to protect all near-zero energy sources until the last fossil power plant on the continent is decommissioned. Then go ahead and retire your nuclear or hydro power plant.
(Addressed to no one in particular, but these arguments in favor of premature retiring of functioning clean energy power plants are widespread and it ticks me off. Plus, retiring them early also increases the cost of electricity, which slows electrification. I bet electric cars would be a LOT more popular--and fossil fuel cars less popular--in Germany if their electricity price weren't so insane.)
There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Ignoring the problem presents a hidden cost and safety risks.
Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.
Back to your point: we need to collectively admit that climate change relates to our practice of postponing the costs of pollution -- a massive economic externality that needs correction. The solutions are expensive and require commitment.
While I agree with you that shutting down existing nuclear plants, assuming they're in proper operating condition, is a bad idea vs the urgency of climate change.
But nuclear power has never been the ultra cheap clean power slam dunk you're portraying. I've been hopeful someone will come up with a clever innovation that changes the cost numbers, but so far every attempt has tanked.
With hydroelectric dams, there is an urgent motivation to bring many of them down: ecosystem collapse. It hurts to lose the storage capacity, but there's a growing awareness of just how severe the damage has been. I don't expect Grand Coulee to come down any time soon but talking with someone who does modeling related to this for NOAA made clear a lot of them are going away.
Not saying I disagree with the sentiment, but I think there are other environmental impacts to consider besides just climate change. Hydroelectric dams have in many cases destroyed complete ecosystems. There have been case studies of how getting rid of existing hydroelectric dams have revitalized otherwise decimated wildlife populations. Check out the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine as an example.
Other than the oft-mentioned risks of nuclear, it is (1) not as cheap as you think and (2) not straightforward to maintain in a warming environment.
1. Nuclear power is far more expensive than renewables, due to the high costs for construction and dismantling. This does not dismiss your argument, because running a nuclear power plant is fairly cheap. The costs therefore speak towards keeping nuclear power plants running as long as they remain safe.
2. Existing nuclear power plants use huge quantities of fresh water for cooling. The required water quantity and temperature make nuclear power plants prone to droughts, which can cause shutdowns, and to flooding events, which can shut down or damage the plant. Both droughts and floods are increasing in frequency due to climate change. This speaks towards closing down power plants that are particularly vulnerable. In any case, grid operators need to be able to mitigate nuclear power plant outages. The cost of nuclear power is even less attractive when overcapacity is needed to accommodate potential outages.
> "Oh, we're going to replace that nuclear power plant with wind and solar!"
I hear you, so please don't misinterpret this comment.
Statistically speaking, I'd imagine that it's actually the increases in production via wind and solar that has in fact caused nuclear (as percentage) to fall. Coal, at least in the USA can't be much different than nuclear.
How much nuclear production has come online since 2010 (i.e., the article's reference point)? Now how many solar panels? Given the long lead time of nuclear (i.e., planning, approval, producing) it's hard to imagine it catching solar anytime soon.
Should nuclear press on regardless? Probably. If only because if nuclear can be the last 15% to 20% of steady output (read: not subject to weather and such) that'll be enough to prevent rolling blacksout and other events due to shortages.
If it costs more money to keep these dinosaurs running than installing solar and wind and batteries to replace natural gas and coal, then... you're wasting money on nuclear.
"Old nuclear" is fundamentally not cost competitive with current solar/wind, and it's only going to get much much worse in the next decade, especially if perovskites hit mainstream utility solar and cheap grid storage (such as that military salt water battery or increasing-density LFP) becomes a reality.
The barrage of hydrogen, nuclear, and synthetic fuel stories is indicative of the desperation of the market reality of solar/wind/electric vehicle/battery economics to oil/gas/nuclear/ICE.
Once the price curves flatten out, then maybe next-gen hydro/nuclear/geothermal can chase a stable price point. I do think nuclear can still beat solar/wind once the economics of those stabilize and with the right regulatory, after all I'm a LFTR stan.
"Old Nuclear" plants will be propped up by the military that want their weapons grade isotopes.
Nuclear was still well ahead in 2019 with 2657 TWh vs. 2103 TWh for wind and solar (699 solar, 1404 wind). But if these relative growth rates continue it will take only 3.3 years for solar + wind generation to eclipse nuclear generation globally ((2657 - 2103) / 170).
Hydropower is still the far-and-away leader of non-fossil electricity generation at 4306 TWh in 2019 (106 TWh growth over 2018):
And how much of that _generated_ electricity from solar and wind is actually produced on demand?
Electricity generated from nuclear power can follow the load, neither wind nor solar can do that meaning you will _always_ need backup power plants.
Germany has 50% renewable energy in its electricity mix, yet their greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector are seven(!) times as compared to France.
There is a reason why China is nuclear power plants like crazy. They understand that electricity is worthless if it can’t be produced on demand.
Keep in mind that hydropower is extremely disruptive to the water ecosystem up and downstream of the facility, destroying habitats and biodiversity. Definitely not the type of side effects you'd consider OK if it's your mission to combat the effects of climate change...
People who decide to build new plants make their decision not from concerns about climate change, but economics. Building a new nuclear plant would be like building a new coal plant, but worse because by the time it's complete the economics will be even poorer in comparison. Nuclear just doesn't make economic sense on any measure: cost per GW, time to complete, up front cost, regulatory difficulty, etc.
So as much a nuclear advocates wish more nuclear plants would be built, unless they want to provide significant subsidies, it's just not going to happen. For the same reason you don't shop around by finding the highest price you can... no one is looking to throw away money. Energy is energy.. no one cares about the type of plant it came from.
While usually people use percentages in the wrong way, in this case they used and compared them the appropriate way.
Percentage here is used as a ratio of total output and a decline in that ratio over time is a decline in role. Exactly what the articles headline asserts. It doesn't matter that nuclear may have grown in absolute numbers. The assertion is that its role has declined which is true.
Punchline is at ~12:45 for anyone who doesn't want to watch a bunch of stuff about voting.
Basically you can only compare (or add, or subtract) percentages if the quantities they represent are exactly equal. And since the quantities of power production change from year to year, they're doing the same thing he's complaining about.
I'm not sure which issue is more polarizing on HN: nuclear power or Bitcoin.
So fission power is easy: I know this will upset the nuclear fanboys on HN but (IMHO) it has no future. And it's not because the technology can't be safe. It's because humans ultimately can't be trusted with:
- Acquiring, extracting and storing the fuel;
- Dealing with the toxic byproducts (eg UF6);
- Maintaining the plants to a sufficient degree of safety on thin profit margins that are the norm for utilities;
- The failure modes are awful; and
- Dealing with the waste.
Governments currently cover some or all of these to some degree so I'm not sure we're seeing anything close to the true cost of nuclear power factoring in the above. Nuclear power thus far seems to have been far more of a political statement than an economic choice.
As for fusion power, that's more murky. I really hope there's commercially viable fusion power in our future but... I'm not yet convinced there will be.
Fusion works for stars because the process happens really slowly (per unit mass) and the masses are so large that gravity contains the "mess".
Heating a fluid to 100M+ Kelvin is always going to have turbulence issues and we don't have a good story for containing the neutrons without destroying our containment vessel. I believe He3 fusion would be (mostly?) aneutronic but... He3 is super-rare (for us here on Earth).
I believe solar has the brightest future. When (not if) getting stuff in orbit is sufficiently cheap that we have industry and permanent residence off Earth then solar is an amazing option. I've seen one estimate that a solar collector in space produces about 7 times the power of an Earth-bound one (night/day cycles, no weather, no atmospheric interference).
I've had this argument so many times in that last month... renewables outside of hydro are just not viable as baseline power until batteries improve cost and density by several orders of magnitudes. Nuclear fission is really the only choice we have right now. We can't avoid climate change by relying on technologies like fusion power & next gen batteries that haven't even been invented yet, let alone mass manufactured.
The nuclear waste argument is a purely American one. European countries (France specifically) have a multi-reactor chain where each successive step uses the "waste" from the last step. While this doesn't eliminate the need for long-term storage completely, it does reduce the potency of the leftovers since they're not being discarded after using ~3% of their total stored energy (a la the US).
Additionally, fission isn't the only way to get energy out of uranium. Nuclear batteries, such as the ones powering Curiosity and Perseverance, can't melt down like a traditional reactor and will continue working until all the energy stored inside it is gone. This is the type of nuclear power I'd like to see gain prevalence for many reasons, foremost of which is the ability for each household to have its own source of electricity independent of a power grid.
Solar in space is all well and good, but without a way to beam that power back to Earth, a space-based solar collector is as useful as if nothing were there at all.
These arguments are all moot. Even assuming that humans can't be trusted with each of these points, then still you are exchanging hypothetical lives and hypothetical damage to the environment for real lives and real damage to the environment.
Who cares about storing fuel and toxic byproducts perpetually? We are destroying our environment right now. It's ridiculous we're even still having these conversations.
It doesn't matter if fission has a future, we could start to build a hundred power plants today, and the first ones would be finished in 5 years, and it would fucking save our planet.
It seems like it would be easier and substantially cheaper to take existing fracking/drilling tech and go for deep-well geothermal, rather than trying to launch a Dyson swarm.
LFTR addresses almost all of those issues that you cite. Those are "old nuclear". Proliferation (doesn't make weapons isotopes as part of its fuel cycle), 99% fuel use and breeding (even can use old "spent fuel"), low/zero meltdown risk with a simple plug that melts and liquid fuel, scalable, startable/stoppable quickly.
But I agree that fission (and fusion currently) is current noncompetitive and not worth investment (aside from research) until the economies of scale that solar/wind/battery are currently undergoing stabilize or plateau.
>It's because humans ultimately can't be trusted with
You can already see what effect nuclear has when the safety is not done well (Chernobyl and Fukusima). But even those cases kill less people than coal done well.
We need nuclear because closing the gap between 80% and 100% clean energy will be much harder and more expensive without it. Comparing the cost of building energy sources today it may look that nuclear is more expensive than renewables, but that's because we are not counting the cost of the additional infrastructure needed by them, which rises exponentially with the share of renewables in the mix.
Also, no energy source is environmentally neutral. Building renewables and it's supporting infrastructure en masse will have a huge ecological impact. You can reduce that impact using nuclear energy (that also have it's impact on nature, but elsewhere). For example, nuclear power plants kill fish, wind turbines kill birds. By using both energy sources it's easier to limit building plants only in areas, where the impact will be low. We'll be still killing some birds and fish, but the chances that it's well within the ability of populations to recover will be much greater, than if we decided to focus on one source.
It's quite disingenuous to project Chernobyl and Fukushima to modern reactors. When you hear about them, always remember that they were designed in 60s and represent the second generation of nuclear reactors. The nuclear technology came a LONG way since then and modern reactors are counted as generation 3+.
After Fukushima safety requirements for reactor designs have been revisited and what do you know? Modern VVER reactors satisfies them without any changes! I suspect other modern designs have performed similarly in this regard.
Also when you hear about issues with construction time/cost or about nuclear waste storage, examples are usually US-specific. There is also Olkiluoto plant, but its issues are more about building a new reactor design using an Agile-like methodology. Nuclear waste problem can be more or less solved with "burner" reactors and fuel recycling, the field in which Russia and France have promising advancements.
Should the old reactors be retired? Yes! Should we abandon the nuclear energy for fashionable renewables? Absolutely, no! At the very least until the storage problem will be properly solved.
Has anyone ever done an actual detailed comparison of unsubsidized nuclear vs. unsubsidized wind/solar? I’d love to see a breakdown of not just dollar costs, but environmental impacts like how much land is required, wildlife affected, supplies acquisition, lifetime of the equipment, disposal of waste/worn out parts, etc.
Funnily enough most of these issues people mention with renewables are the same ones Britain faced introducing nuclear power! They coped by shaping demand with variable electrify tarrifs, creating the world's largest electrical vehicle fleet (milk floats) and charging them off-peak, encouraging storage heaters and electric water cylinders in houses and building pumped storage hydro. What goes around comes around. If you want hope for the future look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station
It seems renewable strategies are still experimental and will rely on some sort of base load system for the foreseeable future. The base load systems being either gas plants or nuclear plants. We can place our bets on gas hoping we can one day turn those plants off using some sophisticated storage solution. The safer bet - however - is perhaps on small flexible nuclear reactors. Once mass produced (~ 10 years) I expect those will be taking over the energy market because of economic factors. Disrupting many complex solutions that are currently being invested in.
Again, I will observe that even though more people will most certainly die from solar and wind installations due to falls and machinery accidents, there is no catastrophic downside. So as much as I think Ansel Adams (37-year board member Of the Sierra Club) was right, that nuclear is a great solution, it simply isn't worth the political capital at this point in history. You'll have to wait until the uninformed die out, which will take longer than evolution.
Question: how much is building new nuclear plants about producing nuclear weapons?
Is that still important? In the UK we’re spending an INSANE amount of money on a new reactor and I’m wondering if that has anything to do with the government’s motivation.
>Today, nuclear power supplies about 10% of the world’s energy, down from 13% in 2010. Its use might continue to fall, although it will remain a part of the global energy mix for many decades, with a role in decarbonizing energy supplies as the fossil-fuel age comes to a close.
An overly optimistic statement if every I saw one. China is a case in point,they're bringing more and more fossil-fuelled power stations online by the year.
And at that rate, the rest of the world risks being left behind in energy poverty or becoming dependent on China et al for their energy needs.
Such a shame that we didn't get to have super cheap, nearly unlimited power by proliferating nuclear because people are stupid and panic over statistical anomalies like Chernobyl and politicians/their constituents purposely made nuclear too overencumbered with BS to be profitable half the time. No doubt fossil fuel companies et al played into this because nuclear was such an existential threat to them. We could have been living in an energy utopia but we weren't ready.
While laws like the Price-Anderson Nuclear Indemnity Act [0] are still in place, good.
While it could never be proven, my suspicion is that this law has done more to hinder the adoption of newer, safer nuclear power plant designs over the years, than any other single thing.
I highly recommend William T. Vollmann's Carbon Ideologies, Volume One for a literary appraisal of the viability of nuclear energy as an alternative to carbon-based fuels. Normalization on the Rocks - page 499 in my hard copy - provides food for thought in any discussion of government "safety standards" after the Fukushima disaster.
I have a very stupid naive question: can a green grid supply enough energy to power a hadron collider, that kind of huge scientific R&D things ? It seems wind and solar can provide for the normal grid but what about industries hungry for a lot of throughtput ? Huge batteries ? How does it work ?
This was downvoted but the reality in Germany is that this is literally happening. I'm in some Fridays for Future chats and coal gets them going, but nuclear is worse. There's a reason Germany phases out nuclear fission before fossil fuels. It blows my mind and my german colleagues are in favor of continuing to decommission nuclear plants. When pressed specifically, they do concede that perhaps it's not the best idea to do it in this order, but they're not against the plans either.
Meanwhile 92% of Germany's energy consumption is still fossil fuels, but at least it won't be nuclear!
[+] [-] Robotbeat|5 years ago|reply
"Oh, we're going to replace that nuclear power plant with wind and solar!"
Oh, really? Are you going to do that AFTER phasing out fossil fuel plants or BEFORE? Because if it's before, you're making the case that climate change is a lower priority than retiring the cleanest and one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed. Because you could ALWAYS choose to just replace those fossil power plants with wind and solar and batteries instead, but you're making the decision to keep that fossil fuel plant running longer than it needs to.
Similar argument for getting rid of existing hydroelectric dams.
And I'm talking about long existing plants, here. All those cement emissions (and reservoir emissions for hydro) already happened and were "paid for." We need to protect all near-zero energy sources until the last fossil power plant on the continent is decommissioned. Then go ahead and retire your nuclear or hydro power plant.
(Addressed to no one in particular, but these arguments in favor of premature retiring of functioning clean energy power plants are widespread and it ticks me off. Plus, retiring them early also increases the cost of electricity, which slows electrification. I bet electric cars would be a LOT more popular--and fossil fuel cars less popular--in Germany if their electricity price weren't so insane.)
[+] [-] protastus|5 years ago|reply
However, I dispute calling nuclear "one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed".
The order of magnitude of Fukushima cleanup costs is $1 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...
There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Ignoring the problem presents a hidden cost and safety risks.
Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.
Back to your point: we need to collectively admit that climate change relates to our practice of postponing the costs of pollution -- a massive economic externality that needs correction. The solutions are expensive and require commitment.
[+] [-] jasonwatkinspdx|5 years ago|reply
But nuclear power has never been the ultra cheap clean power slam dunk you're portraying. I've been hopeful someone will come up with a clever innovation that changes the cost numbers, but so far every attempt has tanked.
With hydroelectric dams, there is an urgent motivation to bring many of them down: ecosystem collapse. It hurts to lose the storage capacity, but there's a growing awareness of just how severe the damage has been. I don't expect Grand Coulee to come down any time soon but talking with someone who does modeling related to this for NOAA made clear a lot of them are going away.
[+] [-] bigbob2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lyschoening|5 years ago|reply
1. Nuclear power is far more expensive than renewables, due to the high costs for construction and dismantling. This does not dismiss your argument, because running a nuclear power plant is fairly cheap. The costs therefore speak towards keeping nuclear power plants running as long as they remain safe.
2. Existing nuclear power plants use huge quantities of fresh water for cooling. The required water quantity and temperature make nuclear power plants prone to droughts, which can cause shutdowns, and to flooding events, which can shut down or damage the plant. Both droughts and floods are increasing in frequency due to climate change. This speaks towards closing down power plants that are particularly vulnerable. In any case, grid operators need to be able to mitigate nuclear power plant outages. The cost of nuclear power is even less attractive when overcapacity is needed to accommodate potential outages.
[+] [-] zbrozek|5 years ago|reply
This paper has some nice maps illustrating why Californians need to do some serious modeling before making electrification choices.
My favorites are:
Figure 2 - fixed monthly charge (showing CA undercharges for fixed infrastructure costs)
Figure 3 - marginal cost per residential KWh (showing CA recoups it in very-high rates)
Figure 9 - marginal profit over social cost (showing CA is super expensive, even post-carbon-tax)
[+] [-] tomohawk|5 years ago|reply
https://asiatimes.com/2021/03/wind-and-solar-reliance-would-...
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|5 years ago|reply
I hear you, so please don't misinterpret this comment.
Statistically speaking, I'd imagine that it's actually the increases in production via wind and solar that has in fact caused nuclear (as percentage) to fall. Coal, at least in the USA can't be much different than nuclear.
How much nuclear production has come online since 2010 (i.e., the article's reference point)? Now how many solar panels? Given the long lead time of nuclear (i.e., planning, approval, producing) it's hard to imagine it catching solar anytime soon.
Should nuclear press on regardless? Probably. If only because if nuclear can be the last 15% to 20% of steady output (read: not subject to weather and such) that'll be enough to prevent rolling blacksout and other events due to shortages.
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|5 years ago|reply
"Old nuclear" is fundamentally not cost competitive with current solar/wind, and it's only going to get much much worse in the next decade, especially if perovskites hit mainstream utility solar and cheap grid storage (such as that military salt water battery or increasing-density LFP) becomes a reality.
The barrage of hydrogen, nuclear, and synthetic fuel stories is indicative of the desperation of the market reality of solar/wind/electric vehicle/battery economics to oil/gas/nuclear/ICE.
Once the price curves flatten out, then maybe next-gen hydro/nuclear/geothermal can chase a stable price point. I do think nuclear can still beat solar/wind once the economics of those stabilize and with the right regulatory, after all I'm a LFTR stan.
"Old Nuclear" plants will be propped up by the military that want their weapons grade isotopes.
[+] [-] philipkglass|5 years ago|reply
https://www.world-nuclear.org/our-association/publications/g...
Global wind and solar generation increased by 265 TWh in 2019:
https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/global-wind-and-solar-ener...
Nuclear was still well ahead in 2019 with 2657 TWh vs. 2103 TWh for wind and solar (699 solar, 1404 wind). But if these relative growth rates continue it will take only 3.3 years for solar + wind generation to eclipse nuclear generation globally ((2657 - 2103) / 170).
Hydropower is still the far-and-away leader of non-fossil electricity generation at 4306 TWh in 2019 (106 TWh growth over 2018):
https://www.hydropower.org/news/invest-in-hydropower-to-tack...
But it's a lot harder to build new hydro projects than new wind or solar projects.
[+] [-] cbmuser|5 years ago|reply
Electricity generated from nuclear power can follow the load, neither wind nor solar can do that meaning you will _always_ need backup power plants.
Germany has 50% renewable energy in its electricity mix, yet their greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector are seven(!) times as compared to France.
There is a reason why China is nuclear power plants like crazy. They understand that electricity is worthless if it can’t be produced on demand.
> https://twitter.com/YanQinyq/status/1368830510210899968
[+] [-] technocratius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fouronnes3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rgbrenner|5 years ago|reply
So as much a nuclear advocates wish more nuclear plants would be built, unless they want to provide significant subsidies, it's just not going to happen. For the same reason you don't shop around by finding the highest price you can... no one is looking to throw away money. Energy is energy.. no one cares about the type of plant it came from.
[+] [-] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
Compare.
Percentages.
Stand-up Maths called this out recently and it's good to mention. I think this might be the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aokNwKx7gM8
Give me the output and our total consumption please.
[+] [-] rrrazdan|5 years ago|reply
Percentage here is used as a ratio of total output and a decline in that ratio over time is a decline in role. Exactly what the articles headline asserts. It doesn't matter that nuclear may have grown in absolute numbers. The assertion is that its role has declined which is true.
[+] [-] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
Basically you can only compare (or add, or subtract) percentages if the quantities they represent are exactly equal. And since the quantities of power production change from year to year, they're doing the same thing he's complaining about.
[+] [-] tchvil|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flor1s|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Microft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cletus|5 years ago|reply
So fission power is easy: I know this will upset the nuclear fanboys on HN but (IMHO) it has no future. And it's not because the technology can't be safe. It's because humans ultimately can't be trusted with:
- Acquiring, extracting and storing the fuel;
- Dealing with the toxic byproducts (eg UF6);
- Maintaining the plants to a sufficient degree of safety on thin profit margins that are the norm for utilities;
- The failure modes are awful; and
- Dealing with the waste.
Governments currently cover some or all of these to some degree so I'm not sure we're seeing anything close to the true cost of nuclear power factoring in the above. Nuclear power thus far seems to have been far more of a political statement than an economic choice.
As for fusion power, that's more murky. I really hope there's commercially viable fusion power in our future but... I'm not yet convinced there will be.
Fusion works for stars because the process happens really slowly (per unit mass) and the masses are so large that gravity contains the "mess".
Heating a fluid to 100M+ Kelvin is always going to have turbulence issues and we don't have a good story for containing the neutrons without destroying our containment vessel. I believe He3 fusion would be (mostly?) aneutronic but... He3 is super-rare (for us here on Earth).
I believe solar has the brightest future. When (not if) getting stuff in orbit is sufficiently cheap that we have industry and permanent residence off Earth then solar is an amazing option. I've seen one estimate that a solar collector in space produces about 7 times the power of an Earth-bound one (night/day cycles, no weather, no atmospheric interference).
[+] [-] Hammershaft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moistbar|5 years ago|reply
Additionally, fission isn't the only way to get energy out of uranium. Nuclear batteries, such as the ones powering Curiosity and Perseverance, can't melt down like a traditional reactor and will continue working until all the energy stored inside it is gone. This is the type of nuclear power I'd like to see gain prevalence for many reasons, foremost of which is the ability for each household to have its own source of electricity independent of a power grid.
Solar in space is all well and good, but without a way to beam that power back to Earth, a space-based solar collector is as useful as if nothing were there at all.
[+] [-] tinco|5 years ago|reply
Who cares about storing fuel and toxic byproducts perpetually? We are destroying our environment right now. It's ridiculous we're even still having these conversations.
It doesn't matter if fission has a future, we could start to build a hundred power plants today, and the first ones would be finished in 5 years, and it would fucking save our planet.
[+] [-] arrosenberg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eeZah7Ux|5 years ago|reply
...and every time there's the same litany of poorly researched talking points repeated ad infinitum.
Almost nobody ever points out the systemic risks of highly centralized power plants in case of war or civil war or terrorism.
[+] [-] christiansakai|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|5 years ago|reply
But I agree that fission (and fusion currently) is current noncompetitive and not worth investment (aside from research) until the economies of scale that solar/wind/battery are currently undergoing stabilize or plateau.
[+] [-] fsflover|5 years ago|reply
You can already see what effect nuclear has when the safety is not done well (Chernobyl and Fukusima). But even those cases kill less people than coal done well.
[+] [-] andbberger|5 years ago|reply
There is no waste problem, stop spreading misinformation [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
[+] [-] graeme|5 years ago|reply
Carbon waste is worse than nuclear waste, yet is given a free pass because it floats and we can’t touch it or see it. But it is very real.
[+] [-] tolbish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s21n|5 years ago|reply
Also, no energy source is environmentally neutral. Building renewables and it's supporting infrastructure en masse will have a huge ecological impact. You can reduce that impact using nuclear energy (that also have it's impact on nature, but elsewhere). For example, nuclear power plants kill fish, wind turbines kill birds. By using both energy sources it's easier to limit building plants only in areas, where the impact will be low. We'll be still killing some birds and fish, but the chances that it's well within the ability of populations to recover will be much greater, than if we decided to focus on one source.
We need nuclear because it saves nature.
[+] [-] fuoqi|5 years ago|reply
After Fukushima safety requirements for reactor designs have been revisited and what do you know? Modern VVER reactors satisfies them without any changes! I suspect other modern designs have performed similarly in this regard.
Also when you hear about issues with construction time/cost or about nuclear waste storage, examples are usually US-specific. There is also Olkiluoto plant, but its issues are more about building a new reactor design using an Agile-like methodology. Nuclear waste problem can be more or less solved with "burner" reactors and fuel recycling, the field in which Russia and France have promising advancements.
Should the old reactors be retired? Yes! Should we abandon the nuclear energy for fashionable renewables? Absolutely, no! At the very least until the storage problem will be properly solved.
[+] [-] krupan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gandalfian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bartimus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] killjoywashere|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kens|5 years ago|reply
I thought that was interesting, but I checked and no, Ansel Adams was not president of the Sierra Club.
[+] [-] jonplackett|5 years ago|reply
Is that still important? In the UK we’re spending an INSANE amount of money on a new reactor and I’m wondering if that has anything to do with the government’s motivation.
[+] [-] cybert00th|5 years ago|reply
An overly optimistic statement if every I saw one. China is a case in point,they're bringing more and more fossil-fuelled power stations online by the year.
And at that rate, the rest of the world risks being left behind in energy poverty or becoming dependent on China et al for their energy needs.
Wars have been fought over less.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jimmaswell|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phs318u|5 years ago|reply
While it could never be proven, my suspicion is that this law has done more to hinder the adoption of newer, safer nuclear power plant designs over the years, than any other single thing.
[0]. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nucle...
[+] [-] ncmncm|5 years ago|reply
Undercounting casualties of nuke disasters has a long tradition.
[+] [-] docmechanic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnchristopher|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doggydogs94|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucb1e|5 years ago|reply
Meanwhile 92% of Germany's energy consumption is still fossil fuels, but at least it won't be nuclear!