Can we please just have both?

Loads of people love to pretend an NPP is just a hut with a magic gem inside delivering an endless amount of power for free. In reality they are huge, highly complex, high-security facilities that take decades and billions to build and need to be operated and maintained by loads of highly trained staff in 24/7 shift operations. This isn't to downplay their merit of providing CO2 emission free power, but for the love of god please appreciate the enormous effort and expense this is achieved with, especially when comparing it to renewables.

It's almost like many things operate exactly like that but don't have people spreading disinformation or fearmongering to the point where people are so pants shittingly terrified of them they won't even consider it.
- Yeah, fossil fuel companies have spent the last 70 years propagandizing against nuclear because it's their largest threat.
From what I understand, the costs and time needed to build a reactor would be far less if the constructions crews actually had experience building them.
Hell yeah they bring high quality jobs as well as clean power
Things that don't exist yet aren't a solution for problems we have now.
It's not like we could now just build a thorium reactor that makes economic sense without decades of serious prototyping. And by that time we might have found that there are more pbolems with it than we thought.
- I mean, China is doing it right now, and we'll have answers in a lot less than decades.
  https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Operating-permit-issued-for-Chinese-molten-salt-re
Don't forget about the environment cost of extracting unprocessed uranium ore.
- Unfortunately renewables have nasty costs like this of their own.
Sighs in thorium LFTR reactor noises.
- That technology is nowhere near mature enough to provide a solution to the mentioned problems in the next decade or two.

Sure, let's pay private corporation billions in subsidies by handling their waste and have more centralisied and expensive energy production. Oh and trade dependencies due to uranium

The most recent nuclear reactor built in the US bankrupted Westinghouse and is set to raise utility rates. Oh, and it’s $17 billion over budget and 7 years late.
- Yep. Yet, Climate scientists still believe that we need to rely on a combination of nuclear and renewable energy in order to combat climate change. This tells me we're bad at it, and we need to get better at building and maintaining nuclear plants.
- I'm pretty sure the most recent reactor built in the US was by GD not Westinghouse, and was on time and budget
- Huh, it's true. sauce
Canada and Australia are notoriously unreliable trade partners. (/s)

Hum... Try sorting it by price.

Is price the only concern? Seems like too narrow of a focus.
Maybe try sorting by "lifespan", as nuclear facilities last 3-4x longer.
You could try sorting by "crude oil usage", as each turbine needs 60 gallons of high synthetic oil to function, each needs an oil change every 6 months.
Would be interesting to sort by "birds killed" or "acres of habitat destroyed"
I'm not saying nuclear is necessarily better, that is a difficult calculation. But we got ourselves into this climate change disaster by short-sightedly "sorting by price". Perhaps spending more money for a long term investment would be more wise than always going with the cheapest option.
- You could try sorting by “crude oil usage”, as each turbine needs 60 gallons of high synthetic oil to function, each needs an oil change every 6 months.
  Oil is usually recycled after it's changed.
- I was going to shred you because nuclear plants also have turbines that rotate and need lubricant, but then I did a quick search and found an interesting article that interviewed someone from a nuclear power plant that claimed one oil change in 34 years. https://www.lubesngreases.com/magazine/15_5/lubricants-at-the-atomic-frontier/
- Try price/year instead of lifespan.
  But yeah, you can go with crud oil usage, birds killed and acres of habitat destroyed too. Those won't give you the result you are wanting to see.
  It's not that nuclear is useless. But it's worse on almost every way. Yeah, that "almost" is important, but the meme is way out of line.
- The waste is worth the carbon emissions reduction.
  If we could replace all our carbon emitting power with wind and solar today I would be in full support. But we can't. Especially in parts of the world where solar doesn't work half the year.
  So I'll take the waste surrounded by warnings burried in a hole over carbon emissions. Carbon emissions are much worse.
- Just need to bury it at the tooth of a subduction zone.
Nuclear power is cheaper per megawatt generated, though.
- That's so against reality that it's funny.
  Nuclear power is as cheap as the sky is green.

Nuclear powered wind farms, to combat natural cyclones with counter spinning cyclones intensively farmed

I vote we blow radioactive material around with giant fans. That should solve some of our energy problems.

Sure. And by the time we have one reactor finished in 20 years and 200% over budget we’ll be completely powered by renewables in that time.

This is the real problem. We shouldn't shut down existing nuclear plants, but adding more in a period when renewables are advancing at a tremendous pace is just... not sensible.
- Especially as the cost per megawatt of renewables is dropping precipitously and the cost of nuclear is actually going up
- We shouldn’t shut down existing nuclear plants
  It's currently more expensive to get a MW from a fully paid for nuclear plant than to get one from a new solar plant.
  What is still not a reason to shut the nuclear one down, but we are getting pretty close.

I find it refreshing to see a bunch of realistic cost comparisons here whereas on Reddit, anti-nuclear voices get downvoted for being “outdated”.

Thorium is abundant and a byproduct of rare earth mining. It's also what the moon is mostly made up of, so our energy requirements on the moon could use locally mined sources for power generation making moon bases much cheaper to operate.

A Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR, not only can't melt down, it can be smaller and require less staff to manage, requires no external cooling so it can be built anywhere, and cannot be used to make bombs. It's also not radioactive by itself.

In the 1940s, both uranium and thorium were looked at as potential fuels for nuclear energy, but you can't make bombs with thorium, so the US went with uranium. LFTRs create no nuclear waste, can be used to burn existing nuclear waste created by other nuclear energy processes, extracting more energy from our giant stockpile of unusable nuclear waste, and if the plant loses power, which is only needed to keep a frozen plug frozen, excess fuel melts and the empties into a reserve tank. Most rare earth mining companies don't even know what to do with the thorium they mine, so they store/stockpile it in hopes of future uses.

It simply baffles my mind that this isn't even on the table for potential, near limitless energy generation in addition to, or in replacement of, wind and solar green energy. The nuclear fearmongering has tainted the idea of safe nuclear power generation to the point that I suspect many of you have never heard of it. We literally have the answer to energy needs for the entire world, using greener production, but since it's new and would require billions to fund and start, it hasn't been considered until recently.

If billionaires really wanted to help humanity, rather than simply saying so for PR and launching their cars into space or creating flamethrowers, this is an investment that, while not as quick to return gains, would be lucrative, forward thinking, and beneficial enough to help all of humanity and this planet. And they could have started in the 50s when the government played around with a test reactor for proof of concept and proved it worked. Imagine a timeline where capitalism and greed weren't a thing and climate change wasn't even an utterance outside of explaining why Venus is so fucking hot!

and cannot be used to make bombs
That is not true. Scientist even argue if LFTRs are a powerful way to create Uranium233.
LFTRs create no nuclear waste
Also not correct. Where did you get your facts from?
- That is not true. Scientist even argue if LFTRs are a powerful way to create Uranium233.
  I cannot find information online about scientists saying anything of the sort, but I don't feel like logging into my work VPN to access the pay-walled articles that might have that info. The amount of time required to get enough material for any significant bomb, at least with the information I can find, makes it impractical for that purpose so I stand by my statement.
  Also not correct. Where did you get your facts from?
  I thought about including little to no waste in there, but opted to put none, because yes, while it still creates some waste, it's significantly less waste, that becomes safe after a few hundred years compared to the several thousands of years that current nuclear waste takes to become safe.
  My message is still correct, which I suspect is why you only selected two sections from the entire thing -- where I over-generalized a statement of fact -- as arguments to negate the entirety of my reply.
  Current NPP are extremely, almost comically inefficient and wasteful. The material is harder to get, harder to handle, less fuel-dense, and the waste produced creates a hazard that spans hundreds of human lifetimes. We've known about thorium for power generation for decades, but greed and "national security" prevented us from acting on it. Coupled with the confusion and misrepresentation of nuclear power as "dangerous" in the eyes of the general public, and we're now on a collision course with a potential wasteland of a planet.
  But hey, don't let a little mistype or over-generalization stop us from knowing options that have largely been withheld or lumped in with more dangerous forms of the same power generation.

I see you everywhere. I'm your secret friend. Ok, not so much a "secret" friend... stalker! That's the word!

Anyway, can you crosspost this to one (or more) of

I haint giffured out xposting on Lemmy, or if it's even a thing.

They'd probably appreciate it.

With the effort you put into this post, you could have just done that posting yourself.
- What, and steal their glory‽ Also, I don't know if there's no ability to crosspost in Lemmy, or my client just doesn't support it. E.g., I recently discovered that there's an "edited" icon in some clients that I don't see in Voyager.
  Anyhoo, OP said they don't play Factorio, so I just might. I juuuust might.
Hey, so that was you hiding behind the bushes!
I haven't played Factorio and wouldn't want to be a poser, but you're welcome to repost or cross post wherever! I didn't make this one.

Nuclear power isn't renewable. Joule for joule, our reserves of nuclear fuel and petroleum are comparable. It's a decent bandaid, but between the finite fuel supply and the nuclear waste problem it's hardly the future and should be used as sparingly as needed to get us off of oil and onto renewables.

clever girl

How about not polluting the ground water for millenias?

that is like 100 nuclear power plants worth

Only if you're paying for it