This is now a pro nuclear power group.
also using safer, molten salt type reactors and other good stuff that's basically been abandoned because it's not profitable
Also because material science hasn't cracked the brittleness problem at commercial scale without just replacing all the tubing every couple years which obviously doesn't make sense. There are several private companies and nation states trying to solve this problem at this very second.
hmm i'll have to do more reading i didn't know that was the roadblock. any other non-water next gen reactor designs we could build with current tech?
There's a lot of new smaller reactor gen III+ designs that are interesting and hopefully able to be commercialized as well as some distant gen IV stuff, but everything is decades out from commercialization (LFTR among those). The nut will be cracked I'm positive, but it will be too little too late for our current climate predicament (same with fusion or other exotic generation tech).
so gas cooled, etc might be viable before everything goes to shit? what about more efficient heat to electricity conversion..like using MHD turbines? or is that too far out too?
I didn't really dig deep into alternative generators so I'm not sure where the commercialization process of that is (though it's pretty cool). Most of my nuke knowledge is from some really in depth state of the industry reports I worked on and is fairly domain specific and linked to it's viability as a climate change friendly source of generation.
ahh ok. you're still better informed then I am i'm just a casual enthusiast. the whole field of power generation is just extremely interesting to me and that sounds pretty fascinating.
Nuclear power is the best but those cooling towers are cringe. In the USSR nuclear power plants were connected to a network of pipes that gave free, unmetered heating to the entire city. This was usually pointed out in the west as symptom of the wastefulness of the planned economy because people would rather open the window than turn down the heat.
Meanwhile in the west they throw away all the waste heat in those massive cooling towers, or they dump it into the sea at such rate that when the pump breaks like in Fukushima the power plant blows up.
I don't really know where you can read more about it, I just have a few friends in nuclear engineering. Googling 'nuclear district heating' seems to give good results like https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/31304794649.pdf and https://sci-hub.tw/10.1007/978-981-13-9528-4 p. 1429.
The real reason we don't use nuclear power is that it takes about six years to make a nuclear power plant, during which time the project is racking up debt from its mortgage, which it can't start paying down until the plant becomes operable. Plants don't start returning an actual profit until about ten years in, after they've paid off their mortgage and interest. A gas power plant could've already started paying for another gas power plant in that time. Not to mention that this ten year time frame is longer than the career of most corporate boards.
Nuclear is good. I used to be against it. I get the reasons why. But the reality is we have a very limited amount of time to get to zero carbon emissions. Solar and wind are great but they can't handle the global energy by themselves yet, even if you assume massive reductions in energy consumption. Nuclear is the bridge technology, and hopefully in like 40-50 years we can shutter every nuclear plant. But until then...
I would argue it's the other way around. Nuclear plants take a long ass time to plan, let alone build. Using solar and wind as a bridge to building worker controller nuclear plants is my thesis.
capitalist nations outsource a lot of the planning and production of nuclear projects, needlessly complicating it in favour of profit
I don't see how that is possibly true.
You don't think that China sacrifices safety for that time frame?
Honestly natural gas is the bridge to nukes which is a bridge to solar and wind
Solar and wind farms take less time to build now than nuclear plants take to plan. This makes no sense at all.
But they don't produce enough energy and are incredibly resource intensive for the energy they generate. There's not enough raw minerals to generate renewable electric for the globe right now with current tech
That's why it's a bridge to nuclear. All the nuclear tech in this thread is being talked about as if it's real but it's mostly theory and testing will increasing the time frame.
Like, there are wind farms and solar farms being built right now. Nuclear plants aren't.
There's quite a few papers and reviews of papers that talk about the time frame issues with nuclear. What people in this thread don't understand is that most of what you are repeating is lobbying material.
Wind and solar is being built because there's massive subsidies right now and very little for nuke. Solar panels are easy to commodify. Nuke power plants are more difficult
I agree but we have to remember that we won't inherit a perfect world if we have a successful revolution. We will have to make do with what is available.
they do produce enough energy and are cheaper, UK energy prices are said to fall in the future because their wind farms have proven to be so good and cheap
They don't produce enough for the entire world my friend. Wind still only amounts to less than 5% of power generation globally. And what do you do when the wind is blowing and it's night out? You either need massive battery installations or baseline power from nukes
They don’t produce enough for the entire world my friend.
not at the moment, true
Wind still only amounts to less than 5% of power generation globally.
True and even at just 5% it is profitable without subsidies in many places!!
And what do you do when the wind is blowing and it’s night out?
Wind blows at night and on a whole continent there is wind pretty much somewhere at all times, also at night power usage is a lot lower and also there are pretty clever solutions for this, not just one solution but a multitude of different things that can be done and already are done.
You either need massive battery installations or baseline power from nukes
The nukes that already exist should be kept until every carbon plant is shut down, so they'll stay with us for a while anyways and yeah, some battery installations already exist and lots of stuff is being developed.
Modern cycled natural gas plants output the almost exactly the same lifetime co2 as nuclear plants when you account for construction, decommissioning, and dismantling because of the huge amount of concrete these plants require. Though to be fair, this does ignore methane leaks from gas wells, so you win some and you lose some I guess.
I wish this wasn't a divisive take considering how scary climate change will be
Yeah I'll happily keep nuclear running, but climate change isn't an argument to build new ones, they take to long to build and are more expensive than renewables.
money is really no problem to the US we have essentially unlimited coffers to use on infrastructure
I mean, with current battery technology there isn't enough lithium on the planet to run the world on wind and solar. So, critical support for nuclear.
Trains are the solutions to all of our problems if we think hard enough.
what's the current opinion on pumped-storage hydro? requires big infrastructure but seemed like a promising solution when i first heard about it
We should be building more nuclear reactors, the majority of the ones around now are outdated pieces of shit from the 70s which give the new ones a bad rep.
Nationalize the industry an build two new ones for each old one decommissioned.
Probably it doesn't help that the US used nuclear tech to kill a ton of people, and the idea of Chernobyl is scarred into our brains
I'm mostly talking about all the people repeating techbro nuclear lobby talking points without doing any dialectics.
In my country the right defends nuclear energy while the left wants to take down the plants we have it fucking sucks
Supposedly being pro-nuclear in US just means subsidizing a couple of hilariously corrupt and inept corporations that can't keep their obsolete stations competitive.
What about the fact that nuclear plants can very rarely but still occasionally MELT DOWN AND KILL EVERYONE AROUND IT, where as if, let's say, a wind turbine fucks up some old handywoman in a pickup has to drive out to fix it.
Deaths related to nuclear compared to wind are significantly lower despite the terrible ways in which the former has failed. Workers falling or being injured on the job causes significantly more death, it just goes unreported compared to the spectacular nature of a nuclear failure.
That and the fact modern design is basically foolproof except where ignorant people cut corners to save money (as occurred at Fukishima which was designed to withstand exactly what occurred but cutbacks on safety in the design for cost saving occurred). I think that if the plants are built by non-capitalists nuclear they should operate perfectly fine now.
What the other person said, mortality rates are similar to renewables per TWh https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Chernobyl and Fukushima created exclusion zones in the thousands of square kilometers that displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Building them in the middle of nowhere isn't an option either, these plants require access to large amounts of fresh water, and such zones tend to be highly populated. Tbh I don't understand how anyone can look at the effects of the previous nuclear catastrophes and conclude that it is a good idea to continue building more.
The reason you can only name those two disasters is because nuclear disasters are so rare when you account for how much energy is produced, and modern reactors are even safer to the point where they're as safe as renewables, look at the data, idk what else to tell you. Logically you should be hundreds of times more scared of fossil fuels.
Fossils are not the alternative to nuclear power, everybody agrees that they have to go. When you include all the costs of nuclear power, instead of ignoring them as externalities as capitalism allows them to do, it is not cost competitive with renewables such as wind and solar.
Good, cost is a better point than safety. It's still pretty efficient so we shouldn't dismiss it entirely yet, there should be more research into nuclear options like thorium
Fully automated liquid salt thorium reactors at the municipal level, powering high speed rail (where the highways used to be) is my dream.
Liquid salt reactors seem like a meme, I mean I'm no nuclear physicist or chemist, but I did look at the paper they wrote on it and a super-hot mixture of gaseous/liquid fluorine+sodium seems like the worst possible place to have a nuclear reaction.
I'm only aware of what I've heard about from a podcast (.Net Rocks!), so I'm not trying to argue viability/feasibility. From what I remember, the whole benefit of using a liquid salt as your fissile material is to reduce (eliminate) the risk of a steam explosion, which is (citation needed) the leading cause of meltdown.
edit: And the whole point of using Thorium is because it's more plentiful, and doesn't contribute to nuclear weapons.
The amount of people here who think they know what they are talking about because they watched a Ted talk one time is infuriating.
Everybody basically completely ignoring the deep deep interconnection between the military need for nuclear weapons and the nuclear industry they grew up from that.
The problems of planning, building, maintaining, decommissioning and waste storage of a nuclear plant are absolutely huge, and they are incredibly expensive and take exceptionally long to build.
They are not the 'one neat trick' to solving climate change held back by annoying hippies and ignorant NIMBYs a large proportion of comments here imply.
That's not to say there is no place for current, and even some new build nuclear, But most countries and regions will have better and cheaper solutions if properly planned. Directing research to safer and simpler nuclear solutions is also good - but a very long term goal.
Later we'll find out that he didn't mean regular old boring safe nuclear power, but rather something like Project PACER.
The energy intensity of neoliberalism is just artificially high because of frivolous production. A communist society can be run with no more than 2 Baghdad batteries per person.
