Nuclear is also a heavily unionized industry. They definitely don't want it to grow.
🎵 So we’ll march day and night
By the big cooling tower
They have the plant
But we have the power! 🎵
Nuclear is a viable transition power source until full green is achieved. A coal plant kills more people and produces more radiation than an equivalent nuclear plant. Nuclear has it's problems but it's better than coal.
Even solar and wind kill more people than nuclear per unit power produced, and they're also much more extractive and environmentally damaging, all because of the huge gap in efficiency. You just need so much more renewable power infrastructure to get the equivalent of a nuclear power plant.
With current battery technology, there isn't enough lithium on the planet to run the world on wind and solar. Pumped storage is inefficient and relies on specific geographic features that aren't available everywhere. So critical support for nuclear.
I support nuclear, but just a reminder that lithium isn’t the only way to make batteries.
With current technology, there's also not enough Uranium to run the world on solely Nuclear, with our present known reserves we only have enough to last about another 80 years under current (small) levels of consumption.
that's just of currently proven reserves at current prices; and as the article mentions a doubling of the price of uranium ore will barely even impact the costs of nuclear energy but dramatically increase proven reserves.
It's also enough time to develop any sort of theoretically better battery technology that would allow for us to run our power grid solely on renewables.
If we assume technological innovation, things get a lot easier.
Exactly, nuclear is the only way to completely kick fossil fuels quickly. Developing a replacement for uranium fission can come later.
80 years is probably not enough to develop fusion... But Thorium reactors were built as early as the 60s
I agree that thorium is a good option. I’m a fan of the LFTR designs. But if we are willing to invest in research I feel like 80 years is more than enough time to get working fusion power generation.
idk, the tokamak folks have been saying they're super close to energy positive reactor designs but they've been saying that for over 20 years and are still nowhere near energy positive and are still usually working with fission byproducts anyways. I think fusion is a great thing to keep researching but it's just far enough away that we need to focus more on fission for energy production, partially just because more experience in fission reactors on an economic and operations level will prepare us better for when fusion reactors are more closely within grasp.
Just put up the sign of the angel and the funny squiggles that mean honor and value.
I wonder if you could put the waste in a deep ocean trench or a subduction zone so that it would eventually get re-absorbed into the Earth's mantle
The waste is why you can't trust capital to properly do nuke. Between Somalia and Yucca Mountain you know they're just gonna dump it on brown people.
I’m a firm believer in storing nuclear waste (once it can’t be reprocessed) on the moon or shooting it into the sun
Chapochat has the same material interests as reddit fascists soyfacing at Elon Musk
on the moon or shooting it into the sun
bruuuh. rocket go boom & you just dirty bombed kazakhstan
Lets be honest about the downsides of nuclear though. It costs a ton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source. I don't know how much to trust this wikipedia page but it's 4-5 times as expensive as wind or solar. The most expensive energy period it seems, and with up front costs. Nuclear waste is a really big deal as well. This might be a bit more paranoid but having a singular centralized power plant for a large area makes it vulnerable to sabotage or attack.
Historically nuclear plants have allowed for further research into nuclear power and nuclear weapons, but I've heard nuclear being described as a technological "dead end." It doesn't seem like we are going to make any break throughs anytime soon, and the dream of cold fusion never materialized either. Although perhaps that is the "big coal psyop" propaganda affecting me LOL
What I'm saying is don't romanticize nuclear too much. Solar and wind power have their limits in their current state, there's potential places in the energy grid for smaller nuclear plants to cover areas where other green sources don't work, and perhaps to act as storage as well. But nuclear kinda sucks though.
There's an environmental case for nuclear in that the power plants have a very small footprint compared to big solar or wind installations, so you don't have to displace native wildlife etc. Spent fuel isn't as big a problem as people think, and it can be reprocessed like they do in France but the proposed reprocessing facility got killed in the USA because of NIMBYism. Nuclear plants (at least pressurized-water reactors) are built like bunkers and can withstand a lot, and they take security very seriously. At least that's what this TED talk claims
If we already had Full Communism and money wasn't a thing I could see nuclear power being more viable. It also might be cheaper than renewables with battery storage, but I don't know the numbers on that. Smaller reactors that can be throttled up and down more easily might replace natural gas power plants to fill in during high demand. Or if we had Full Communism we could just stop working when the power goes out.
I listened to some of the people who wrote the IPCC report that the current GND is based on in person. They're saying that Nuclear is good, but can't be built in time to avert the climate disaster. Nuclear should have been in the works 20 years ago.
But what that means is we need to start building nuclear now alongside the shorter term solutions needed to avert disaster.
Yes, in addition to carbon sucks. They had mentioned politicians potentially using those as weak gestures to stave off real change.
The primary appeal of fossil fuels is that you get to decide when you use them. Where as Solar/Wind tend to be incidental to the moment without substantive storage capacity.
But the "peak" periods of energy use tend to correspond with "peak" periods of renewable energy production. And the proliferation of renewables is still relatively small, such that we aren't even at the baseline energy demand for the average day. That makes renewables both attractive and immediately profitable to produce, so long as we're ok with relying on coal/nat. gas in a supplementary role.
Nuclear provides a benefit similar to FFs, in so far as you can vary the amount of fuel you input and electricity you generate. But then there are all the problems listed above.
If you love your free-market model for energy, nuclear doesn't work. It only works when you're willing to do the kind of subsidization and central planning that China does but the US despises.
It only works when you’re willing to do the kind of subsidization and central planning that China does but the US despises.
And when you do a PR campaign to get rid of the stigma behind it.
You don't need a PR campaign for a utility.
People are very happy to have electricity and very upset when it goes out. After that, most people don't think about where it comes from
You do in a lot of ways. Anti-Nuclear is very popular in the environmental movement.
Anti-coal is popular, but it wasn't environmentalism that crippled the coal industry.
There's a reason almost all the pro nuclear boosterism is funded by right wing business interests, along with shitting on renewable energy.
under capitalism capital controls the resources to make the renewables too. capital has the proprietary rights to license repairs for your solar panels, to manufacture the replacement parts.
if you're making arguments from under capitalism, it's literally nuclear which has better standing, because nuclear materials are government owned/tightly regulated in most nations for national security reasons.
Another consideration in line with this is where the waste goes. Whether it’s a barrel’s or a cargo ship’s worth of material, it will go somewhere. and that somewhere is going to be the zip code of historically oppressed and underserved people in this current system.
"never thought I'd die fighting side by side with an elf" meme but never thought I'd upvore an RT article "what about upvore an anti imperialist article"
I saw the typos and I'm keeping them
Molten-salt reactors that can't melt down would be the best type of nuclear. A technology the US government developed in the 60s and which, if used, is intrinsically safe. If they had used that style reactor at 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima there would have been no disasters.
More on LENRs and MSRs: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a34386186/molten-salt-reactor-new-design-nuclear-waste/ https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/energy/energy-resources/Moltex_-SSR-_Low_cost_nuclear_power.pdf https://www.forbes.com/sites/llewellynking/2020/10/13/new-design-molten-salt-reactor-is-cheaper-to-run-consumes-nuclear-waste/?sh=88745ad33c62 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor https://www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/pages/Molten_Salts_Reactors.htm https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/molten-salt-reactors.aspx
NASA wants to put a nuclear reactor on the moon. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/15/why-nasa-wants-to-put-a-nuclear-power-plant-on-the-moon.html
If they did that, they could setup a huge Tesla coil and provide wireless energy to earth from the moon via induction perhaps?
You can't use open pool reactors to produce electricity since they don't produce steam, but they can be used to heat buildings etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swimming_pool_reactor
MSRs are an interesting technology which should be pursued, but regular pressurized-water reactors like Hualong One or Three Mile Island are a proven technology that can be built and operated very safely.
Three Mile Island was blown out of proportion by the media, it never released harmful radiation. The meltdown was due to operator error, not the design. Fukushima was a boiling-water reactor which has its faults but is also generally a safe design. Its failure came about because it was built in an earthquake/tsunami zone and all the safety measures were compromised -- for example all the backup generators and batteries were in the basement, which flooded with seawater. Chernobyl was an unstable design from the start because it was also designed to produce plutonium for bombs, and then some idiots decided to carry out a risky test in the middle of the night during a shift change. Edit: read Atomic Accidents for more on how and why nuclear power plants have failed. It's a really interesting and entertaining read.
I don't know much about the physics of Tesla's energy transmission plans, but IIRC it either wouldn't work or it would've ionized the entire Earth's atmosphere if it was built to scale. Other people have proposed transmitting power from space to Earth with microwaves, but I don't know how well that would work. And I'd feel much safer living next to a nuclear power plant on the ground than having one fly over me in a rocket to the moon.
