Fossil fuels produce terrible waste we store in the air that we breathe.
Terrible waste that we store in our lungs
Yes, but when things go wrong, the boom is relatively small and contained.
We can't run a regular coal or natural gas power plant here without fucking it up and getting people killed. Despite the safety of modern plant designs, I do NOT trust the people in charge here with fissile material.
Yes, but when things go wrong, the boom is relatively small and contained.
Not so: https://daily.jstor.org/the-tragedy-at-buffalo-creek/
That's why people prefer driving over flying, right? If something goes wrong, the boom is small and contained.
Never mind that planes are much safer and efficient at travelling long distance.
When things go wrong? When things go right for coal and gas plants, the "boom" is a humanity-threatening event that already in its extremely early stages has been named the Holocene Extinction.
I don't think even one of those fast fission reactors is still in operation. Wonder why that is.
Because, it does not destroy all waste, despite a cartoon claiming as such and gullible people falling for it? Even "short-term" waste needs to be stored somewhere for about 500 years. Sure, it ain't like the others in terms of length of time but anyone who thinks that is a cheap fact or trivial is an idealogue. Since they can exist at both extremes.
So the issue of the water table or general environmental contamination is not addressed the way OP claims. There are also higher costs and higher grade fuel is required. Not to say that there are not some advantages but the cartoon is just plain incorrect and taking a toodler's view on some serious concerns. The Wikipedia article has a list of disavantages for anyone to look into.
They're politically unpopular, more expensive than fossil fuels, and most of them are prototypes.
India and China each have one. Russia has 3.
I blame Nixon for why nuclear power in the US sucks. He axed research on any reactor types that didn't produce plutonium for weapons, including thorium reactors. Hope he's rotting in hell.
According to Wikipedia there are a few, with more planned. But not nearly enough. IMO, we should switch over to Fast Reactors as standard.
It's not really needed. Waste is a boogeyman, but not really a problem. It takes an incredibly small volume to store the waste, and it can be reduced with reprocessing to run in the exact same reactors.
At some point in the future when there actually is a huge amount of waste causing issues, then it might make sense to build a reactor to use it.
Have a look at the size of the Finnish waste repository.
"They'll hold a total of 5,500 tonnes of waste," says Joutsen. "So Onkalo will take all the high-level nuclear waste produced by Finland's five nuclear power plants in their entire life cycles."
The Finnish repository is designed with a life of 100,000 years. Homo sapiens (i.e us) have existed for about 300,000 years.
Article about the problems warnings that will comprehensible in 10,000 years https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time
when there actually is a huge amount of waste
Over 60,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel are stored across Europe (excluding Russia and Slovakia), most of which in France (Table 1). Within the EU, France accounts for 25 percent of the current spent nuclear fuel, followed by Germany (15 percent) and the United Kingdom (14 percent). Spent nuclear fuel is considered high-level waste. Though present in comparably small volumes, it makes up the vast bulk of radioactivity.
~ 2019 https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/
Last "brilliant" plan I heard was dumping it in a hole deep enough we'd never need, nor be able to recover it.
Since there are economic, ecological, conceptual and engineering problems, only five Fast-neutron reactors are operational at the moment. Three in Russia, one in India and one in China. Not surprisingly these are countries that also have an interest in producing weapons grade Plutonium, which FNRs are capable of.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2968/066003007
https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-breeder-reactor
https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs15glaser.pdf
https://energypost.eu/slow-death-fast-reactors/
https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/report/And while nuclear energy production peaked 1996 at 17% and was nowhere near overtaking fossil energy production in it's 70(!) year long existence, Renewables will overtake fossil fuel power production in 2025, with only minute risks for the biosphere.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/renewable-power-set-to-surpass-coal-globally-by-2025/
https://www.renewable-ei.org/pdfdownload/activities/REI_NuclearReport_201902_EN.pdfSo why cling to an outdated technology when there are viable solutions at hand, which are nowhere as complicated and dangerous as nuclear fission? It's the monetary interest of a dying nuclear industry and its lobbyists.
So nuclear plants of the future won't be run by companies who cut important corners on safety to maximize shareholder profits while offloading the consequences to the government and public?
I hear the argument being made that companies shouldn't be allowed to run a nuclear power plant, or any infrastructure for that matter.
I mean that's how things work in China with state owned companies. I don't see why everybody shouldn't be doing that.
Good news: America already does it too!
No they’ll be run by companies that own everything around them as well, and are naturally incentivized to avoid failures.
Government subsidizing this crap is why it’s built so cheap.
The problem with Nuclear Power is that people with strong opinions about it either way are some of the most annoying you'll ever see.
The trick is to force them really close to one another.
Or just bury it miles underground in the desert, but for some fucking reason a state is as likely to store it upstream in a concrete shack as they are to ship it to the mojave where the pit is literally already dug out and designated.
Legal says don’t touch the nuclear waste
You don’t want to be the guy who fucks that up
The fact that any nuclear power plant has ever ran anyways is because unspent nuclear materials were transported to the facility. We as a society should have the means to transport these things safely in large sealed containers. The only feasible downside to this idea is that the containers will eventually heat up, so chop fucking chop mates. Get it there.
If nuclear stops getting outstripped by renewables on cost I might be more interested in it.
Only when you don't include grid storage
Yeah that is problem. It did just make me think though: I read recently about a UK project to build a solar farm in the Moroccan desert the size of greater London and lay undersea cables all the way back to southwest England. They claim it will be half the cost of the new Hinkley C reactor, which is just up the road and that includes building from scratch the ship to lay the cables. Now, instead of having this solar farm to the south, in a similar timezone, what if it could be to the east or west? There is already an international grid in this part of the world, so perhaps if it was extended, there could be renewable energy coming in from wherever, whenever it was being produced. The sun is usually out and the wind blowing somewhere. That would reduce the burden of storage. It would also require a high level of cooperation and trust, which has its pros and cons.
Just remember that Low level Radioactive Waste is a thing, unless there’s a fast reactor that runs on smocks and used syringes
This is the thing a lot of people don't understand. The vast majority of radioactive waste isn't fuel. It's cladding, PPE, etc
Correct time was 40 years ago when renewable were worse. Instead we built coal and gas generally. Now the worst people want nuclear, except they don't actually want it, they just use it as a cudgel to not build any green infrastructure
It's so annoying that being irrationality afraid of nuclear power is simply assumed to be a leftist position where I live, by leftists and non-leftists alike. No thought goes into it, nuclear power is scary because of nuclear bombs and Chernobyl and that's it.
Nuclear power is still the most expensive way to produce electricity by a large margin.
Sure, we could save ourselves from extinction, but what about shareholder value?
It's more expensive than solar, wind and batteries, though. Not just coal or gas.
It is not.
And there is no large margin.
Referencing several sources that consider a vast array of power generation technologies, from offshore wind to biomass, terrestrial wind, solar, gas, coal and nuclear, and nuclear energy has high start up costs and it's also not the cheapest per megawatt of power. It's basically middle of the road on most of the stats I've seen.
Solar, by comparison, has had a much higher LCOE as recently as 5-10 years ago. Most power construction projects take longer than that to plan and build, then operate for decades. Until the last few years, solar hasn't even be a competitor compared to other options.
Beyond direct cost nuclear has been one of very few green energy sources, the nuclear materials are contained and safely disposed of. Unless there's a serious disaster, it's one of the most ecologically friendly forms of energy. The only sources better are hydroelectric, and geothermal. The only "waste" from nuclear is literal steam, and some limited nuclear waste product. A miniscule amount compared to the energy produced.
Last time I checked, all of the nuclear waste that's ever been produced can fit in an area the size of a football field, with room to spare. For all the energy produced, it's very small.
Yet, because of stuff like Chernobyl and Fukushima, everyone seems to hate it.
I live in Ontario, Canada, our entire power infrastructure is hydroelectric and nuclear. I'm proud of that.
Nuclear isn't the demon that people believe it is.
LCOE of solar is lower than nuclear for eleven years now. Wind has had lower LCOE than nuclear for 14 years now. See figure 52.
Building a new nuclear power plant takes 9-12 years on average. Hinkley Point C in southeast England was announced in 2008 (16 years ago) and is projected to be finished in 2028, with costs now being estimated around $40 billion. These long realisation times are not a european issue alone, as Korea's Shin-Hanul-1-2 faces similar problems.
Safely storing nuclear waste is expensive, too.
No. And pretending it is longer for solar is false too. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf
Yet, because of stuff like Chernobyl and Fukushima, everyone seems to hate it.
Is that a bad reason really? When nuclear goes bad it goes really bad and it can go bad due to human error which is something that will always be present. When a solar panel catastrophically fails it doesn't render the surrounding environment uninhabitable for decades.
This comic is pretty bad. It oversimplifies both positions to the point of complete triviality, then uses it to mock a group of people. The comic is not insightful, or funny, or representative or any real people in any sense. It's basically just a jab at some people that the author doesn't like.
then why aren't we already doing that? Probably it's not as cost-effective? nuclear power is already crazy expensive.
That being said a very small amount of nuclear I'm fine with, just to make up for renewable fluctuation until we figure out power storage
China is doing it, but I can't tell you why the west is so backwards.
Ralph Nader interview goes into details on nuclear power
KPFA - The Ralph Nader Radio Hour: America, Stop With the Nuclear Power. It’s Not Going to Happen.
Episode webpage: https://kpfa.org/program/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour/
Media file: https://archives.kpfa.org/data/20240318-Mon1100.mp3
Here's some reading material: https://www.bmk.gv.at/en/topics/climate-environment/nuclear-coordination/fairy-tales.html
here's some more reading material from a country that actually knows what it's talking about https://www.caea.gov.cn/english/n6759365/n6759369/c6792804/content.html
This meme is nonsense. Fast reactors do not alleviate the problem; if that were the case, waste would not accumulate around the world, to the point that no one knows what to do with it. There are no geologically safe storages for millennia.
A nuclear power plant has a useful life of about 40, at most 50 years, after which there remains a ruin that must be eliminated, a deconstruction that can last decades to eliminate thousands of tons of debris with medium and high radioactivity. This, adding to the storage problems, is a tremendously expensive process that is also carried out with public money, not by the owner company. In the event of an accident, see Harrisbourg, Chernobyl, Fukushima and some more, large areas of the country remain contaminated for many years.
The statement spread by nuclear companies that nuclear power plants do not pollute during their operation is a lie. They produce almost as much CO2 as carbon plants, since they require transportation from third countries, if they do not have a Uranium mine nearby, apart from the energy requirements in the enrichment processes in centrifuge plants. The warming of surrounding aquifers due to cooling, with important impacts on local fauna due to the proliferation of algae and lack of oxygen in them. Not to mention the risk of a meltdown due to lack of refrigeration, when the aquifer disappears due to a drought, which precisely now with global warming is a real risk.
The promotion of nuclear power plants has pure economic reasons for certain companies and in some cases weapons reasons to justify the production of the necessary Uranium and Plutonium.
Nuclear energy is only acceptable in medical applications with short half-life isotopes and in space probes. A nuclear alternative will only exist with fusion plants, the current fission plants are not an option.
The reason for rejection is not hate, but rather knowledge of the cause and consequences.
Do they actually produce as much CO2 as carbon plants? Do you have a source for that claim?
In terms of nuclear waste storage, the IAEA claims 390,000 tonnes were generated between 1954 and 2016, and a third has been recycled.
The US EPA claims the US generated 6,340 million metric tons of CO2, and 25% were for the electric power economic sector.
The nuclear waste is stored on site, but I imagine carbon waste is stored mostly in our atmosphere...
The narrative I have heard is that nuclear energy waste is much more manageable than fossil fuel waste, but if nuclear energy has emissions or scaling problems I'm not aware of, I'd be happy to revise my preconceptions about it.
You might need to back up some of your statements with a source there. Lots of words, none of which make sense.
Your numbers are way off. A nuclear power plant generates about a tenth of the emissions of a coal power plant over its full lifecycle. This includes things like:
- Plant construction
- Plant decommissioning
- Uranium mining
- Uranium transportation
- Uranium enrichment
- Fuel reprocessing
- Uranium mine reclamation
But none of this really matters in comparing the two. Coal power plants also need to be constructed, and have fuel transported to them! They don't just sprout out of the earth like manna from God!
Is it better than solar, wind, or hydro? No. Those generate about 5 to 20% of the emissions as a nuclear power plant (depending on which you're talking about) when you include manufacturing and construction. Fortunately, functional governments (read: not the West) are capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time! They're doing both! Which is smart—I'd rather have a nuclear fuel storage problem in 100 years than a "whoops, humanity went extinct!" problem. We don't have a lot of time here.
Well, coal plants also need to be constructed and deconstructed in its finl life, but its much easier to do without problems, apart the fuel transport is also less problematic, most countries have own coal mines nearby, no need of importing it with dependency of third countries, which never is a good idea with changing world politics (see dependency of Russian gas in Europe). But yes, Nuclear Power isn't an option, at least not the fusion power, and fission power maybe in 10-20 years, except in poor countries anyway.
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