In light of climate change I lean towards it being positive but I'm not very informed on this.
Physics guy here. They are majorly good; They produce extremely clean energy with minimal input fuel, their waste is localized and extremely tiny, and the field has an incredible amount of room to grow to be even better with investment (thorium, reprocessing, fusion). The problem is the input cost of constructing the reactor and it takes like 10 years to make.
Solar and Wind don't produce a lot of energy compared to the amount of rare input materials necessary to construct them, but they are much faster to build. They are also much more likely to break down.
Well, those parts still degrade. Efficiency also drops over their lifetime, I think.
Degradation is ~1%/yr, we're hedging that the panels will be good for 25-30yrs but nobody has been around long enough to actually know. In good states, the panels justify themselves much sooner than that.
In certain parts of the country solar makes a ton of sense. Others, not so much. If millenials ever start owning houses, hopefully it'll become normal to see panels (and batteries) on most people's houses. Boom, instant distributed power grid... No more blackouts in CA and the west coast as climate hell continues to engulf us all.
Green New Deal could be dope ya'll.
Source: i work in solar
The panels are exposed to the environment, and do eventually break down. They also need constant maintenance to clean off the surface. They also need batteries to be useful in any way, which also have a shelf-life and need to be replaced.
yes, theyre made of rare materials that are very finnicky and can ablate into the environment. wind turbines also require plastic to function and leech microplastics into the environment.
They also need very little labour, just have to clean them.
thats a lot of labor actually, in comparison to nuclear. in fact it requires something like 79 solar workers to produce enough power to equal 1 coal worker's energy production.
for example: the wind sector employs 101k in the usa, solar employs around 370k on and off workers, coal at 86k, and nuclear employs just 68k. when you consider that solar produces 1.8% of our energy grid, wind produces 7.3%, and nuclear 19.7%.... you start to ask some bigger questions about labor use efficiency here
Really? Even once it’s running? Coal stans in Australia winge about solar not creating any jobs and I believed them.
EDIT: could those numbers be because renewables are a growing sector? Or are they just that inefficient. Also wind and solar don’t need any material input aside from construction and maintenance. Shouldn’t the labour required to extract and transport the coal be included.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/01/f34/2017%20US%20Energy%20and%20Jobs%20Report_0.pdf this is my source, afaik it includes that labor for coal calculations, same with solar. all the little bits that go into it, including auxiliary services.
they are extremely labor inefficient. just think about it. you need to hire people to fix panels, go out and drive to maintenance, clean them, and you can have random panels fail at any point so you need to constantly be ordering new ones. they slowly grow more inefficient as time goes on, too. nuclear is a very controlled environment and each plant hires around 500-1000 people. the upfront costs are big but labor cost and maintenance arent huge.
Huh ok, thanks for the source. The Australian government has looked into the feasibility of nuclear multiple times and decided its not economical viable, but I think a large contributing factor to that would be the lack of skills, knowledge and equipment in the country already.
there are some places where wind and solar make more sense with current nuclear tech, i dont think australia would fall into that category. places that are very remote and are not connected to a grid currently are the best options for wind/solar. with australia they might just be jerking it to coal though. wind is also highly unavailable for the vast majority of global south nations. whitey is hogging all the good wind spots.
also, whoever is downvoting me: show yourself, coward.
it’s not me! not sure why I’m being upvoted when you clearly know a lot more about the subject than me.
Not much seems to be happening with thorium research tho. Didn't the Russians have thorium reactors a few decades ago, but abandoned a technology that seemed to be working?
Yeah i know, it would need a societal effort to dedicate money to research it more. Unfortunately, the world is fucked except for China basically. I don't know what they're doing regarding nuclear, though.
the chinese are the main benefactors of the tech right now, i read an article recently about how they basically bought up all the thorium researchers to come to china to work on things
right that one of the things that worries me, I mean it right be less true now but don't solar panels only last like 15 years
I believe they are good for 25 but it’s a new technology that is rapidly improving. By the time you replace them in 20 years you’ll get panels that’ll last 50 years.
It doesn't matter. Debates on "nuclear good" in the abstract are useless (at least in America).
If it's about policy, then for at least 50 years "pro-nuclear" has meant "give more money to Westinghouse execs and laugh as Westinghouse fails comically to build a plant for another 10 years." It has never, ever, meant "nationalize GE-Hitachi and Westinghouse and design nuclear power plants instead of bombs in Sandia."
That's the more useful thing to push on, I think. After that's done we can debate how many nuclear plants AMERATOM should build.
do you want the effort post version or the ELI5 version?
because long answer short. nearly mandatory long-term and much better than current alternatives.
Nuclear energy nuanced.
It’s both good and bad... any one summarizing it as purely good or bad is wrong.
Personally I would support using nuclear power as the transition to get entirely off oil and gas and coal, while renewable and fully green solutions are implemented over time to meet demand.
The argument to that is why not just make the green solutions asap. Good argument.
nuke waste as another tool of colonial genoicde is a big elephant in this thread
technological leaps have been made to re-use fissile waste, and meanwhile it just keeps getting dumped off the coast of somalia
Yeah well, nuclear power is just very cool. Have you considered that? "Nuance" smh my head.
With the cost of building new nuclear vs building new solar and wind, at this point it's more cost effective to just build and invest into more solar and wind. And in order to save unused power, build a pumped storage power plant. This can pump water into a tank and when there is more demand for electricity, the potential energy of the water will run past turbines and generate more power (basically a giant battery). I realize this isn't effectual everywhere, and maybe that's where new nuclear can be built, which is safe if handled correctly. But we're under capitalism, where nuclear fails due to skirting regulations and not over building the necessary failsafes to prevent accidents.
tldr: nuclear can be good, but pragmatically nuclear bad due to capitalist negligence and comparable or worse cost to power ratio than solar and wind.
lol cost effective? in what measure? nuclear is the least labor intensive, which as socialists, is what we should be caring about. not cost
Cost effective to build and maintain. As another user pointed out, it takes 10 years to build a nuclear power plant. If you're building nuclear, you better make damn sure it's safe and won't have a meltdown.
nuclear is the least labor intensive
As if nuclear plants don't need upkeep and constant monitoring, nevermind the 10 year build time.
Costs of materials don't just disappear in a socialist society. The materials still need to be harvested and assembly and maintenance of our power stations still need to happen. Besides, my post is talking about right now , not a world that doesn't exist yet. If we do achieve socialism, then yes the goal would be to eliminate the need for as much labor as possible. You can't ignore current material conditions and the fact that we are still in a world run mainly by fossil fuels. When you look at the lifetime of a nuclear power plant and the lifetime of solar and wind, if all things are near equal, go with the option that doesn't have the chance to irradiate innocent people.
look at the current labor costs. i posted it in another post in this thread.
no, i'm saying that thinking purely about dollar signs is capitalistic when you consider the amount of good that comes from nuclear. other things outweigh dollar signs.
and whats your point? you really think we're going to invest into wind and solar? that shit will cost even more to get our society to 100% carbon free energy than nuclear will. and when you consider land use, appropriations... things get way out of hand. youd need an area the size of a small state to power our current grid with solar or wind. not the case with nuclear. i'm not advocating for a 100% nuclear setup, as i think thats as unfeasible as a 100% renewables setup. but i think our society should be around 90% nuclear.
also, solar and wind do produce a ton of toxic waste, so lets not act like its a victimless thing. solar produced around 250k metric tons of waste in 2016. that's for around 2% of the worlds energy, and by 2050 with current growth trends, it will be 78 million metric tonnes. id rather we focus on reprocessing nuclear waste, which we already know how to do, to get rid of it entirely within a decade or two.
Trick question.
The truth is it doesn't matter. The governing capacity of liberal states is at an all time low. They cant get people to wear masks during a pandemic. You think they can go on a building spree of 4th generation nuke plants?
Not going to happen (except maybe in china).
Good in theory, but with many cons:
- Very costly and construction can take ages. The shortest afaik is about 10 years in South Korea. Increasing demands to safety and aditional capabilities drive costs and complexity even more.
- Costs per kW/h is generally way higher.
- Renewables in comparison can be installed way faster and more flexible.
- Technology is generally extremely expensive and unattainable for poorer countries, giving advanced/rich nations another lead in development.
- Uranium is kinda like coal, in the sense that it is non-regenerative and can be controlled by capital way more easily than decentralized renewable sources.
- Nuclear waste is nasty stuff and disposal/storage is usually highly controversal. Almost no politician wants to deal with it.
My ideal scenario would be:
- Massive increase of renewables, storage and general energy efficiency.
- Massive decrease fossil fuel energy via stringent regulation and divestment.
- More ressources for fusion research as the next step of energy production for baseload power plants. (Keep some smaller renewable sources online though)
Fusion to me is a mistake. It's like hydrogen fuel cells. It's a pipe dream that sucks money, resources, and development away from batteries and other technologies that are feasible.
Fusion is 15-20 years away and always will be.
A friend of mine works here: https://www.iter.org/
Fusion is very viable, you just need to have the infrastructure to start and sustain a much hotter reactor core than fission.
you just need to have the infrastructure to start and sustain a much hotter reactor core than fission.
Isn't that precisely what makes fusion not viable?
I mean, they're in the process of building a tokamak which so long as their math is correct and there aren't any major problems with the simulations should produce 500MW of fusion power from 50MW of heating power.
It's not 15-20 years away, it's 5 years away. They've been building it since 2007 and it's on track to be up and running in 2025.
If they can get fusion working to a point where it's reliable, passively safe, cheap enough to compete with the dropping price of solar and storage, and then build it out worldwide to create capacity, were looking at a minimum of 40 years.
My skepticism isn't that fusion will work someday, it's that we have solutions now that can meet our timescale of actually doing something to mitigate the climate crisis, where fusion (and to a greater extent hydrogen fuel cells) are experimental technologies that take away from the move away from fossil fuels. The longer we wait to replace fossil fuels the happier fossil fuel companies are.
This is why hydrogen fuel cell research is funded by fossil fuel companies - take take momentum away from solar.
Maybe fusion will work. 5 more years to start testing test the first large scale reactor. 5 years minimum for more testing. Then say every country starts building right away, that's another 10-15 years.
And that's assuming everything goes smoothly and the designs work properly on the newly scaled up reactor.
Maybe fusion is the thing to save the world - but my perspective is our battle with climate change can't wait another 20 years without phasing out fossil fuels, and we have tech now (solar, nuclear) that's capable of replacing fossil fuels.
Nuclear fission is the best existing option in terms of pollution, resource use, construction labor, maintenance labor, and fatalities. So uh, nuclear good? Some of those might not fit with your intuitions, but the comparison is not one nuclear power plant to one wind turbine, it's one nuclear power plant to a thousand wind turbines. Which are all real machines made of real components that need actual maintenance and catch on fire sometimes.
Nuclear power plants take ~7.5 years to build on average (most are shorter, a long tail of plants sit in permit hell forever). This is not a problem for a centrally planned economy - you don't have an infinite supply of labor, so you can't actually build all your renewable energy at once to take advantage of the better turnaround time. It is a big problem under capitalism, which requires that each plant sit there not making a profit for seven years while it gets built, during which a faster to build plant could've already turned a profit and started funding the next, multiple times over.
(I'd also hope that a centrally planned nuclear power buildout would, you know, take a single reliable but somewhat dated plant design and build a thousand of those, saving a bunch of time and labor. But, as an engineer, I prefer to plan on no technology or process ever improving, and being pleasantly surprised if they do.)
So if you're arguing in front of your local central planning committee, go pro-nuclear (and also get me a visa to wherever you live). I you're living in a capitalist country, push for whatever you can get (and sabotage an oil pipeline if you get a chance).
Yes and no. Nuclear in the us sucks, using 60 year old technology that produces 100x more waste than newer technologies. The waste from us reactors can literally be used to fuel other reactor types.
There is still a waste problem from newer reactors, but it is 100s of times smaller than what is nuclear detractors state.
we definitely do have ways to recycle it, down to a half life of 10 years in many estimates. but we dont do that because our government has a boner for nuclear bombs of many varieties, which reprocessing would hinder the production of
Nuclear good, as part of a well-balanced renewable energy infrastructure. Really, every major urban area should have at least one nuclear reactor, unless it can get literally all of its energy needs from hydroelectric.
I think it's very sexy. I wish I liked numbers more because I would study nuclear engineering. Oh well.
