Power Sources
Power Sources
161 comments
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When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.
If you’ve been told “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, you have been a victim of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable.
This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream or potential future tech such as nuclear fusion, thorium reactors or breeder reactors.
Compared to nuclear, renewables are:
- Cheaper
- Lower emissions
- Faster to provision
- Less environmentally damaging
- Not reliant on continuous consumption of fuel
- Decentralised
- Much, much safer
- Much easier to maintain
- More reliable
- Much more capable of being scaled down on demand to meet changes in energy demands
Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. But at present, while I’m all in favour of keeping the ones we have until the end of their useful life, building new nuclear power stations is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.
Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on building nuclear power plants should be spent on renewables instead.
Frequently asked questions:
- But it’s not always sunny or windy, how can we deal with that?
While a given spot in your country is going to have periods where it’s not sunny or rainy, with a mixture of energy distribution (modern interconnectors can transmit 800kV or more over 800km or more with less than 3% loss) non-electrical storage such as pumped storage, and diversified renewable sources, this problem is completely mitigated - we can generate wind, solar or hydro power over 2,000km away from where it is consumed for cheaper than we could generate nuclear electricity 20km away.
- Don’t renewables take up too much space?
The United States has enough land paved over for parking spaces to have 8 spaces per car - 5% of the land. If just 10% of that space was used to generate solar electricity - a mere 0.5% - that would generate enough solar power to provide electricity to the entire country. By comparison, around 50% of the land is agricultural. The amount of land used by renewable sources is not a real problem, it’s an argument used by the very wealthy pro-nuclear lobby to justify the huge amounts of funding that they currently receive.
- Isn’t Nuclear power cleaner than renewables?
No, it’s dirtier. You can look up total lifetime emissions for nuclear vs. renewables - this is the aggregated and equalised environmental harm caused per kWh for each energy source. It takes into account the energy used to extract raw materials, build the power plant, operate the plant, maintenance, the fuels needed to sustain it, the transport needed to service it, and so on. These numbers always show nuclear as more environmentally harmful than renewables.
- We need a baseline load, though, and that can only be nuclear or fossil fuels.
Not according to industry experts - the majority of studies show that a 100% renewable source of energy across all industries for all needs - electricity, heating, transport, and industry - is completely possible with current technology and is economically viable. If you disagree, don’t argue with me, take it up with the IEC. Here’s a Wikipedia article that you can use as a baseline for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
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Excellently written!
I am so tired of people who have no idea how good wind and solar are/have gotten smugly declaring that wind and solar will never be good enough to meet energy demands...
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Thank you! Please feel free to copy and share. There is so much pro-nuclear rhetoric online, particularly on Reddit, I debate it every time I see it but there’s too much for me to do alone.
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This perfectly sums up the problems with nuclear energy an why renwables are the better option
thanks for writting this comment
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Thank you for the kind words! Please feel free to copy and share :)
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Obligatory Kyle Hill videos because keyword “nuclear energy”:
Some things to note:
Going back to 1965, air pollution from fossil fuels has cost us around 81 million lives. 4,000 people in China die every day due to fossil fuel pollution. 1 in 5 premature deaths can be attributed to fossil fuels.
Radiation in pop culture is portrayed as difficult to contain, but that isn’t the case. We know how to do it well, and we already do it.
Pop culture depictions fail to illustrate the radiation that is released into the air, unable to be properly managed, as a result of fossil fuel production and consumption.
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Containing the radiation isn't the same as resolving the nuclear waste problem.
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We would have had that solved a long time ago if it weren't for a few factors.
The first is that a significant amount of radioactive waste is short-term. Like, literally inert after a couple years. The reason for that is because the vast majority of radioactive waste isn't actually inherently radioactive. Most of it has become radioactive as a result of coming into extended contact with highly radioactive sources. However my understanding is that despite being short-lived, you must dispose of it the same way you'd dispose of nuclear fuel rods. This is an issue that could be resolved by separating the short-lived stuff from the fuel rods and returning the short-lived stuff to a landfill once radioactivity drops to background radiation levels.
Factor 2: paranoia. We had a potential permanent waste site in the middle of nowhere, in an extremely geologically stable area in the US that has virtually no chance of flooding, however people thought that radioactive waste buried beneath a literal mountain would somehow still poison them. So Yucca Mountain was never fully completed. Afaik it's technically still on the table but it's been completely defunded thanks to NIMBYs, so instead nuclear waste is being stored across the US at various nuclear plants which are less geologically stable, have a higher chance for flooding, etc. This also hampers state and national efforts to clean up decommissioned plants and nuclear accidents. The waste has to go somewhere; if you have no where to safely store it, you can't clean it up.
Factor 3: if I understand correctly, we could hypothetically design nuclear plants with reactor chains that produce dead fuel rods (fuel rods that are completely spent). However, a lot of weapons-grade material would be produced during the intermediate stages. For sooome reason everyone freaks out when they hear you're making weapons-grade radioactive material, even if you promise you're just using it to generate power. I can't imagine why /s
The problems with nuclear storage are actually pretty easily solved, it's just that no one wants to because they'd rather pretend nuclear doesn't exist to begin with. I swear, we could have a one-time pill that makes you fully immune to every radiation-induced disease and people would still freak out about nuclear. Hell, there was an article I saw a month or two about how a bunch of researches discovered that turning used graphite control rods into diamonds resulted in low-power batteries that could be used for things that require a small amount of power over long durations (like SSDs or RAM). Iirc something about the diamond's structure meant it contained its own radiation as well, meaning it didn't need any radiation shielding either despite generating energy via radioactivity.
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And the non insurable nature of nuclear power besides its distant break even point is the reason only governments have ever build nuclear plants, or had to give huge guarantees. There are financial problems with nuclear, too.
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Containing the radiation isn't the same as resolving the nuclear waste problem.
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ITT oil and coal propaganda proving propaganda and fear mongering work.
Nuclear is safer in every single regard. Even including weapons nuclear energy has harmed fewer humans than coal or gas by far.
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In Australia, nuclear is being used as a propaganda tool by the coal lobby to defend their interests against renewables because the build time is so long (and I suspect because the miners are more or less the same).
Large scale solar with batteries is 1/6th the cost, 5x faster to build, better for the environment, better for energy independence, and doesn't carry the risk of an event that'll render an entire country uninhabitable. I'm yet to hear a decent argument for nuclear.
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the build time is so long (and I suspect because the miners are more or less the same).
Correct. It takes a long time to build a miner. Regressive politicians are hard at work to rectify that though, by once again allowing minor miners to mind the mines.
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Is nuclear safer than solar and wind?
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Just saying anyone who disagrees with you is a shill is the absolute most pathetic argument, it's what conspiracy loons do.
No one is saying use coal or gas that's a red herring all the nuclear proponents love to try and throw in there, nuclear is hugely expensive and very slow to build with lots of complex supply chain, waste management issues, and security issues where as renewables are able to be installed far faster, cheaper and safer.
It's either waste huge sums on building nuclear reactors while we continue to burn gas and oil for the ten to twenty years it takes to get a reactor online OR invest in renewables and get off fossil fuels quicker, cheaper and safer.
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I love how people will blindly support nuclear power plants so strongly that any argument made against them is automatically called propaganda.
My power electronics professor told us the same thing you did, that nuclear power plants are dead because they're too complex and expensive to maintain in the long run, and that renewables are the better choice at this point. Maybe this will change as fusion reactors improve, but we're probably decades out before industrial fusion plants start showing up, if they ever do.
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Love that the meme format uses water and hydro isn't fuckin mentioned
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The thing with hydro is that it is limited by the hydrography of the country.
Once you've built all damns it was possible, that's it. And that usually only covers a just small portion of a country's energy needs.
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That applies to availability of fossil fuels too, though. Everyone acts like it's never gonna run out, but the number one producer of oil and gas in the world is literally causing thousands of miniature earthquakes and poisoning groundwater in a desperate effort to get to the worst quality fossil fuels.
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offshore drilling could be jammed in the background, too
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geothermal is there, we just can't see it cause it's underground
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ITT: People regurgitate oil company propaganda verbatim.
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Nobody wants to maintain anything.
When you fail to maintain coal, gas, wind, or solar, it just stops working for the time being.
When you fail to maintain nuclear systems (be that poor understanding, lack of training, negligence, whatever), things go very bad very quickly.
This is before you get into wider issue's like waste management and environmental concerns.
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Oh boy, another hot take from a well educated and informed source, I’m sure.
80% of what you think about nuclear is fossil fuel propaganda, 10% is because the soviets are dipshits, and the last 10% are reasonable concerns that redundant safety system upon redundant safety systems address.
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Every safety system makes it more expensive to run and they're already not profitable, do you really think they'll just keep throwing money into it without cutting corners? One little economic downturn and we start getting problems...
Why even risk it when we could have far better systems from the start? Nuclear is nice in science fiction but when you actually have to plug the numbers into the real world it doesn't look good at all, especially not compared to wind, solar and tidal
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Insulting people you disagree with is a rather poor way to win them over and/or create productive discourse.
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Let me tell you about the "Asse" in Lower Saxony, Germany...
There is no way to safely store nuclear waste. It makes entire landscapes unusable, it lasts nearly forever and... the waste management is done by the state, not the company!
Nuclear power is some capitalist bullshit that outsources the waste and risks to the state. Only in that case its profitable in any way.
Solar and Wind are so much easier, solar extremely. If we could change out loads, focus everything on the day and simply not use that much at night, we wouldnt even need that much wind. Decentralized, local networks of Solar Power are the future.
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We tend to forget the negligence humans are capable of.
But to be fair, abolishing nuclear was a trick to expand oil, gas and coal afaik. At least the funding came from there iirc.
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True, but there were also concerns about the proliferation of nuclear technology and the risks of nuclear war.
If we could power the earth without nuclear or fossil fuels, that would be objectively better. But it just doesn't seem possible.
And trying to achieve an impossible goal while simultaneously burning even more carbon is irresponsible.
So we need to quickly build out the required nuclear capacity.
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Waste management and environmental concerns are already bad with coal power (even worse than nuclear power, in the sense that nuclear doesn’t launch waste into the air as far as I know, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong)
Although, yes, security has to be higher for nuclear power, but nuclear is not as bad as most people think
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Suppose I should clarify:
I like and support Nuclear power, I'm just listing one of the biggest reasons it's not hugely prevalent in our societies over other sources: The large risk involved.
In theory it's a fantastic energy source, but in practice I don't really trust those that manage it. Stuck between a rock and a hard place really.
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New nuclear reactors are fully or nearly fully automated I think. If humans disapeared overnight, they can fully shut down by themselves. Also newer reactors are made so that you need to actively monitor the reaction to even keep it going unlike old reactors (that are not in use anymore I think) that had you monitoring it to prevent it blowing up.
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Playing devils advocate here:
Automated systems are not maintenance or error free and the costs of mistakes are vast. It may have been designed to detect problems and shut itself down; but has it been maintained well enough to successfully do so? Maybe, maybe not.
Given how well maintained most public infrastructure is, I'm not very confident.
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A shut down nuclear power plant is a problem though. Especially when you consider that many people here advocate for a massive increase in the number of nuclear power plants. A river going dry, a shore line that moves, future wars or pandemics that we can't even foresee now. All these are huge risks for nuclear energy. For really no reason since there are renewable energy sources that do not share these risks.
The overhype of nuclear power seems completely surreal to me.
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Seriously. A finicky system which requires constant monitoring is a bad idea. People have problems maintaining their cars.
Simple, robust, and capable of absorbing neglect is better.
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I wouldn't say that's true for gas. Without the right maintenance and/or shutdown procedures, refinery systems can reach dangerous pressures and literally explode.
Even shutting down a refinery is a very calculated process. If the refinery teams decided to walk away doing nothing, people would be in danger. The sheer amount of toxins released could kill quite a few, let alone explosions or fire.
I'm not a big fan of gas power, but it's surely deadly in the wrong hands.
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My
firstsecond... paragraph was a bit of a simplification.While that is true, a refinery explosion is far less impactful than a nuclear meltdown.
Don't get me wrong, both are really bad; but a refinery gone wrong doesn't leave huge amounts of land entirely unusable for decades.
Honestly I'd rather avoid both and go for energy sources like wind, solar, hydro, even geothermal. I think we could go a long way if the majority of homes had panels on the roof and some local storage for night time use.
I've said elsewhere; I like the concept of Nuclear energy, I just struggle to trust those that run it, particularly given how neglected much of our existing infrastructure is already.
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I don't get it, didn't Europe produce like 100% wind power at one point this past week?
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Solar is also at a record high and cheaper than ever. I think this is just some weird fossil fuel meme meant to be ignorant.
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replace skeleton with cooling rods and this meme gets better tbh 😂
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Fantastic!
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It's already got the Cherenkov radiation though.
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Correct me if I'm wrong but even though Nuclear sounds cool. In the vast majority of places isn't it less costly, to go with renewables, instead? And for a greater power output? And also renewables can be created in a fraction of the time without any r&d. That's not even mentioning the potential hazards and waste management issues with nuclear.
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If you only use the faceplate capacity of the facilities and include battery storage for free then yes solar and wind looks pretty good. Once you factor in needing 4-5x the capacity for wind and solar to actually produce power regularly, add cost for non existing storage it gets a lot closer to where the difference isn't significant.
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nuclear is on demand though which is it's great advantage over renewables
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Wind and solar are (mostly) good from a risk/benefit analysis, and I think further investment in battery tech would make them even better. But the problem with nuclear, other than waste, is the fact that noone has tried building like a bunch of reactors that are basically the same. So the training becomes industrialized, repairs and manufacturing, over time it gets cheaper. In France, correct me if I'm wrong, they did this and it was really successful. In general the main problem with both technologies is lack of public investment, i think due to political consequences from oil companies, general bourgeois resistance to public works and investment, etc.,
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I don't know about initial costs, but the main problem with wind/solar is they cannot be scaled up/down on-demand. The depend on the weather and that does not align with energy demands throught the day.
As long as we cannot store energy at-scale, we will have to rely in another source of energy we can ramp up/down depending of the energy demands (being fossil fuels or, preferibly, nuclear)
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That's a taking point that wasn't very true in the 70s and certainly isn't close to true now, there are endless methods of balancing a renewables grid for constant power involving endless options for continuous generation methods (solar thermal especially) or battery storage (chemical, gravity, etc) and load balancing using at-peek tied industry (especially e-fuel manufacture)
There's also a lot of stuff like tidal generation which is hugely promising and drastically underfunded, certainly compared to nuclear.
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In Australia our conservatives run on the promise of nuclear power, but they've been in power for 20 of the last 26 years and haven't ever attempted to implement it, they just use the promise to stymie the development of renewables.
Imo the time to try to use nuclear to suppress oil and gas was 50 years ago.
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The lack of love for Hydroelectric makes me sad
Hydroelectric power is the backbone of electricity here in Brazil :P
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There are only so many suitable hydro locations, and pretty much all of them are used in the developed world.
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Nuclear had its time. Solar and wind is cheaper, can be distributed and has a fraction of the waste and supply chain issues.
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I'm increasingly of the same opinion, however, I dislike the fact that even talking about nuclear as a potential bridge technology is such a polarizing issue.
I am very far from being an expert on the subject and accordingly don't have a strong opinion either way as to what role, if any, it can usefully play in transitioning to sustainable energy models.
What I don't like is the immediate labeling of either side of the issue as somehow automatically being indicative of bad faith or "shilling" on behalf of a larger, nearly conspiratorial interest.
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its not that nuclear is bad, but it's very expensive and takes a long time to commission, where the bridge between now and full scale renewable is on a shorter time frame. if the idea of using nuclear as a transition was made 10-20 years ago, absolutely. now, it's kinda too late.
so pretty much the most economical solution is to go all in on renewable from now on
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Solar and wind have location, storage and reliability issues. Nuclear completely takes the place of fossil fuel generation on all those fronts.
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What about tidal?
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Unfortunately tidal is actually not renewable.
This may sound stupid, but tidal probably destroys the environment faster than fossil power.
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Oh yes, let's focus on an extremely expensive energy source! Let's get rid of dependencies of dicatotors by making us dependent of other dictators to get uran! Why waste any more time on energy sources that pay off after a few years when we can have an energy source they'll still have to pay for in 100 generations? So genious!
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Not to mention how long it takes to find good spots since noone wants to have one in their backyard and even if you have a spot it takes almost a decade to build m
Also you need to guarantee cooling which is going to be a bigger and bigger problem in the coming years...
So much better than spending a fraction of the money to build renewables much faster with less risk...
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Right? I'm pretty sure everyone downstream of Fukushima likes it this way. The people who are hoping we don't need an actual priesthood, or glowing cats, or whatever, to warn people about nuclear waste thousands of years in the future after the fall of all current civilizations, like it this way.
Let nuclear continue to waste away as the terrible idea it always was.
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There are real gold nuggets of useful nuclear tech that we need for the energy revolution. We can make it safe, and we will need all tools at our disposal.
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Not in France!
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Pollution? That's a problem for future Homer.
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Very true.
I would support reactors which aren’t designed to produce enriched uranium, don’t blowup when neglected, and don’t produce as much waste.
There has been some work on molten salt reactors recently, which look promising.
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Literally.
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Spicy take: we need to curb our addiction to power sources.
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No need
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The main power utility in Idaho is looking into nuclear power generation. I'm pretty excited considering I'm in the utility industry.
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We have learned nothing from history.
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Fossil fuels have killed orders of magnitude more people and, get this, release more radioactive pollutants into the environment, than nuclear energy.
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too bad the average person equates anything with the word 'nuclear' in it as atomic bombs
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Yes. But warm metal is scary to the lead poisoned boomers. We can't have warm metal.
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Love me some whataboutism
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nuke plant vibes are sublime
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Belongs in ichiel.
Energiewende is an absolute catastrophe
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Fun fact, all the pro-nuclear bullshit you hear is just regurgitated nuclear lobbying propaganda.
The only reason nuclear has such a following is because people (almost always men) think they think they're in the know. It's unironically very typical of how the alt-right pipeline starts. People think they're being given all this "truth" about nuclear and now they're knowledgeable about stuff that other people aren't aware of or that other people are believing the "mainstream" thought about. It also helps that nuclear followers see themselves as edgy. It's a perfect rabbit hole for these people who are easily influenced to fall down.
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Nuclear would have really worked though, but green advocates just HAD to ruin it. (I'm talking about majority) Wind and solar will never truly take off or be mainstream because everyone rather do coal and gas, including the governments. Congrats people we're fucked!
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green advocates just HAD to ruin it
MRI used to be called NMRI, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, because it uses the reaction of the nuclei of atoms to create images. Unfortunately people are fucking stupid and freaked out when they heard "nuclear" so they had to drop the N.
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The only people who really prefer coal and gas over wind and solar are the fossil fuel industry. They want to keep their place on top of the energy market, and attempt to do so with lobbying and propaganda, . Wind in solar are more than powerful enough to provide for all our energy needs, and either we will eventually switch to them or be replaced by the people who were smart enough to switch to wind and solar.
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