1y ago

U.S. Pledge To Triple Global Nuclear Energy By 2050

www.huffpost.com U.S. Pledge To Triple Global Nuclear Energy By 2050 Is Joined By More Than 10 Nations So Far

African countries feature prominently in the White House push to triple worldwide use of both nuclear and renewable energy.

When I first read the titile, I thought that the US is going to have to build A LOT to triple global production. Then it occured to me that the author means the US is pledging to make deals and agreements which enable other countries to build their own. Sometimes I think the US thinks too much of itself and that's also very much part of American branding.

Where are my renewable bros at? Tell me this is bad.

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Nuclear power isn't bad. I used to be anti-nuclear energy because of the specter of Chernobyl, 3 mile island, and Fukushima. But learning more about it, there haven't been many actual problems with nuclear energy.
Chernobyl happened because of mismanagement and arrogance. 3 mile happened because of a malfunction. Fukushima happened because of mismanagement and failure to keep up safety standards in case of natural events.
These are all things that can be mitigated to one extent or another. it's much cleaner than other forms of energy, outputs way more than solar or wind, and with modern technology can be extremely safe. I think we should be adopting nuclear, at least as a stopgap until renewable tech reaches higher output in efficiency.
Kinda annoyed that these investments are going into foreign countries, when we are one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas. We should be building them here first to mitigate our own ghg contributions, then helping smaller countries build theirs.
I do still have concerns about waste removal and storage tho, but I'm sure we could figure that out if we actually wanted to. But I doubt we do, because "dA cOsTs" or some shit.
- Chernobyl had such a far-reaching environmental impact. Beyond even the radioactive pollution stuff, it scared everyone away from nuclear power and back to fossil fuels for energy production. I sometimes wonder where we'd be wrt CO2 levels if nuclear energy adoption had continued along the same trend as it was before Chernobyl. Would we have had substantially more time to mitigate climate change? Maybe we'd have been in the same boat (or an equally bad boat) due to other factors; maybe it would have stymied renewables even more due to already having a readily available and well-established alternative to fossile fuels in nuclear power. Idk. But if someone wrote one of those what-if alternative history novels about the subject, I'd read the heck out of it.
  
  Imagine if every oil spill was taken as seriously
  
  Wow. Well fucking said, my friend. You are absolutely right.
  
  Or every preventable death from coal.
  Or all the deaths resulting from our decision to rely on Russia for energy.
  
  Damn. This one is so spot on. Definitely remembering that one for the next time the Chernobyl argument comes up.
  
  Chernobyl had such a far-reaching environmental impact.
  Ironically, the main direct impact (i.e. excluding the indirect, but far more important, policy impact you talked about) is that it basically created an involuntary nature preserve.
  
  a nature preserve with fancy radiaton-eating mushrooms, to boot! (the jury is still techinically out on whether or not they are "eating" it, but in the immortal words of Fox Mulder, I want to believe)
- Nuclear is too expensive. It doesn't make sense to build new reactors.
  
  It doesn’t make sense to build one new reactor. Tripling the world’s nuclear power generation makes a lot more sense. At that scale it’ll be cheaper.
  
  No it won't lol
  
  Most things decrease in price as production scales up.
  Is called Economies of scale.
  There's also a lot hype around process improvements such as Six Sigma. Some of this has come out of factories and into IT and software dev such as kanban boards and agile.
  Strangely most think that software development does not have economies of scale.
- Anyone still worried about the safety of the method is an ignoramus. "Dying slowly to lung cancer and the environment cooking me alive is so much better than the one-in-a-billion chance of having to eat some prussian blue"
  Waste removal is my biggest concern. Unless the plans to expand also come with ways to recycle the waste, we're just setting ourselves up for giant exclusion zones throughout the globe, most likely in small countries where the plants are imposed on them by foreign economic powerhouses and then they're told to figure the waste out themselves.
  Not to mention "just bury it" is neither futureproof nor is it good for the non-human inhabitants of our planet; sure if those concrete containment cysts in the desert ever fail it will "only" be leaking radiation into the desert, but any desert is still home to hundreds of species of living things and its own complex ecosystem. "Desert" doesn't actually mean "devoid of life"; there are no good locations to bury it and forget it.
  Let's talk about the absolute devastation mining rare materials does to ecosystems and the exploitation of third world countries that it's led to. We're already implicated in so much violence against the earth itself and colonialist exploitation, and I'm supposed to support gods know how much more of that for Uranium from Kazhakstan (45% of the worlds' production in 2021)? That's basically begging for more forever wars over energy resources in the middle east.
  "We'll figure out long term solutions after the infrastructure is put in place" is how we got to where we are with fossil fuels AND landfills.
  I'll fully support any plans to make a push toward nuclear, but the foremost concern of that push should be waste recycling. After that's figured out, everything else is small potatoes. It would even make the long-term costs cheaper than fighting for new material and figuring out million-year half-life hazardous waste disposal. A nearly unlimited energy supply that doesn't fuel wars and is safer than the current system? Sign me the fuck up.
  
  Regarding waste; nuclear waste can be turned into diamond batteries.
  If they manage to release, the idea is that small cell batteries can self-recharge themselves practically forever (20,000ish years?). Battery dead? Remove it, swap it, wait. Battery dead? Insert the one you removed previously, the Uranium inside replenished the charge.
  Neat stuff given that it is made from waste byproduct.
  
  That's cool as fuck! Now, how do we implement it?
  I should have been a little more clear: I'm not worried about a lack of ways to properly neutralize and dispose of the waste, I'm concerned that they will not be implemented because they are deemed unprofitable.
  Already the U.S. runs nuclear power, and yet we still haven't implemented waste recycling (as of 2022 iirc the article I read); why? Presumably because ultimately it does not serve the interest of capital. So get plans to create that infrastructure into effect, and I'll get on board with any expansion. Until that happens, it's just hopping on the dick of this new tech because it's bleeding edge and assuming the infrastructure to handle it will follow (which has worked so well for e-waste and cars and fossil fuels and plastics and...)
  Not that sticking to fossil fuels in the meantime is a better alternative. We should focus on energy production that doesn't have the potential to immediately kill us should the waste-containment fail: solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric. Hell, we already have stockpiles of a majorly combustible fluid that requires an ever-increasing amount of energy to harvest, why not exchange it for one that doesn't also cause biosphere collapse as a side-effect: Hydrogen?
  None of these are environmentally friendly either, and so I'd still prefer to see nuclear in the long run instead. Strip-mining Uranium is still better than the massive amount of mining needed to get the rare metals necessary for solar at large scales, wind farms are destructive to local wildlife, hydrogen can explode and needs a constant source of water to produce while requiring a way to dispose of all the sediment generated, dams and massive water reservoirs are a blight on the landscape and disrupt entire ecosystems; I have no clue how geothermal is even harvested, but if the other renewables are anything to go by...
- It's not "da costs", it's actually really, really really expensive to build new nuclear reactors. Most of that comes from increased labor costs, which in turn have ballooned largely due to increased regulation and oversight requirements, which I would argue is not something we should do away with.
  I wouldn't necessarily mind having a reactor or two acting as base generators especially during the winter, but
  In Germany we've been searching for a secure waste site since the first reactor went online in 1957. If we haven't found it yet, we never will.
  There's not really a reason to hope for cost reduction of reactor construction once we do it at scale, because requirements and local acceptance are too heterogeneous to implement any sort of scaling construction. Every jurisdiction will have its own risk assessment and usually the locals are none too happy about a reactor close to them. I just don't see something happening in that regard. Wind turbines and solar panels on the other hand can be churned out in factories at scale, which is why they're so cheap, comparatively.
  Therefore, personally I'd rather invest in green H2 as an energy storage solution. We can easily generate an enormous electricity surplus during the summer months, but lack long-term storage of the electricity. So we shut off solar and wind farms when they're over producing. Wouldn't it be neat to instead let them keep generating and use that surplus energy to power power-to-gas plants E. G. with H2? It's an enormously power-hungry process, but if you do it when power is basically free...
  Oh wait, we're already doing that and it's already cost-effective. Now, if we were to take that process and build it at scale... for example by not spending 12-20 Bn 💶 to build another Flamanville, Olkiluoto or Hinkley Point C... I think that might actually work.

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