I am interested in hearing your opinions about nuclear power, what you know, if you have any fears, or ideas? Do you know if your country has any nuclear power generation?
It’s better, smaller, and even more eco-friendly than what is generally considered “green”.
But it takes a very long time to get up and running, and the current world is all about the short term.
One downside I see is that bad cunts can bomb them. Like Israel bombing the Russia-operated one in Iran.
I am defintely not against nuclear power and I am also not afraid of any nuclear disasters seeing how safe nuclear reactors actually are. I still prefer solar and wind power over nuclear tho because we still deal with nuclear waste and not very well imo. I would also love having fusion reactors or helium-3 fission reactors which also combats the nuclear waste problem.
It was worth it 30-50 years ago. But we wasted too much time fucking around.
At this point any money spent is better spent on wind and solar.
I’ve seen this mentality too many times. The fact is China is actively building many nuclear power plants. The idea that it’s “too late” is ridiculous. There is growing demand for nuclear power. You can have solar, wind, AND nuclear.
With unlimited resources, yes it would make sense to keep building nuclear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
But wind and solar have outpaced nuclear. You can get way more power way quicker with wind and solar than you can nuclear.
And what we need right now is maximum speed. We don’t have time. This transition should be happening overnight, but we’re dragging our feet.
In reality it makes sense to keep building nuclear, the resources required to build nuclear are mostly different than building solar and wind, so you can definitely do both to increase carbon free energy rapidly. I agree we need to rapidly scale solar and wind, but we also need to be advancing nuclear power technology.
Also solar and wind need batteries because of their variable generation, again which are different materials/knowledge than nuclear mostly.
They may take different materials, but until we escape capitalism the only thing that will matter is the literal monetary cost.
In a perfect world, we would be doing both side by side because of the different materials needed. But in the current world the opportunity cost exists due to monetary limits.
Like you keep saying “we”. China is currently doing what you mention “in a perfect world”. Why can’t we do the same? Why is it that Illinois stopped at around exactly 50%? They ACTIVELY constructing these.
We as in humanity. The majority of nations are capitalist nations, and all nations use currency, which means opportunity cost.
Every state and power utility that is considering what to allocate their money on is going to choose the bare minimum it takes to keep the lights on. That means going the cheapest, not doing the most.
China may have a lower opportunity cost due to the tighter control over the economy, but they’re still paying it. China is not in the perfect world situation either. They’re just sacrificing the opportunity cost.
I’m confused, do the Chinese not count as a part of humanity? The entire world is losing to China when it comes to nuclear power increases.
Nuclear energy is expensive to generate compared to its green competitors. Therefore, it’s a waste of time and money to focus on it at a time when renewable energy is currently cheaper to produce, knowing that the gap between nuclear and energy is projected to widen even more.
My only complaint to add to the debate is that too much of the waste discussion assumed it’s burnt fuel and not just irradiated junk shoved in barrels. At least that is what a former nuclear engineer complained to me about.
The second I guess in the US is the weird public private deals that permiate the industry. Like who’s the inspector? Oh that’s a private company? Whos responsible for the waste? The government? Where is it stored? Oh your not sure? It was SUPPOSED to here but some of its there and some of it supposed to recycled but some supposedly can’t be. Who funded this? Who’s profiting?
I got some very confusing answers asking people in the industry about it, and they seemed to agree it was confusing.
I am extremely pro. Hear me out. For instance in Scandinavia, we have some of the largest uranium deposits in the world. Yet we import most of our fissile material from Australia. By boat.
The Scandes (mountain range) happens to be one of the best places to store spent fissile material on the planet.
We also have a highly educated workforce, and some of the best universities and colleges in the world.
We also have regional depopulation in the areas where this would be relevant, and suffer from brain drain, because there is more money to be made abroad for the whole range of academic disciplines, so the smartest people, and a fair chunk of the lesser smart people, move abroad. Because lack of opportunities and money.
Furthermore we are addicted to not only fossil fuels like carbon and gas, we (Europe) import most of our energy from Russia (famously). And we are making a lot of geopolitical concessions for the privilege (Nordstream springs to mind).
My proposition is that we expand nuclear power in the nordics, massively. We mine our own uranium deposits, store the spent fuel in our own mountains (think Moria, Nords would make for great LOTR dwarves), create a massive surplus of energy, then sell it off to the rest of Europe, creating basically an energy export hegemony. The energy basket of Europe.
We’d be fucking kings.
Then we’d create a Nordic Union, and get nukes, but that’s a different story.
(Just as a fun fact, Sweden had one of the worlds most advanced nuke programs after WW2. They got talked out of it bc USA)
Reprocessing spent fuel is also a massive opportunity. But yea I am 100% in agreement with you.
Right? Let’s build world class long term storage, it’s like a parking garage, a scam old as time, just rent out space to whoever can’t or don’t wanna deal with their shit and cash that check monthly. And we can enrich and be lords, of course there are some political obstacles to say the least but what are we if we don’t dare to dream
Maybe I’m thinking about the whole thing in a SimCity 2000 kind of way but that’s just how I was brought up.
It’s good and has few downsides, but I feel like we kind of missed the boat and solar is the move now.
There is still massive energy demand, “missed the boat” is kind of nonsensical.
I live in Taiwan and we are actively shutting down our nuclear facilities. Now the majority of our electricity is from fossil fuels.
I much rather work towards clean energy but at the same time only use nuclear power.
I think we are making big mistakes ditching it.
Renewables have two problems that need to be complemented by other type of energy source.
1.- they take a lot of land. As energy demand increases the amount of land taken is going to reach a limit. Then what?
2.- Most renewables have low momentum. Mostly only hydro have great momentum. This is critical for net safety. My country recently falled into a total blackout among other things because our energy composition (high on renewables) had low momentum and couldn’t handle some inestabilities.
For a complementary energy source we have 2 options, burning coal/gas or nuclear. Out of two options I prefer nuclear Sadly every country that ditched nuclear because “renewables are the future” ended upping up their gas/coal consumption for energy production. Most famous example being Germany.
I do think a mix of renewables and nuclear is the future we need to achieve.
Sadly most western societies only look on the short term. And a good national nuclear plant is a long term investment, most governments won’t look so far after the next election, so here we are.
Powerful, but also nonsensical in a world where nuclear reactors have to be stopped because the water used to cool them isn’t cold enough. Several reactors in France are powered down or nerfed during heatwaves, for instance. Also, when nuclear goes wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong, with consequences for generations. It doesn’t sound reasonable.
I personally feel safer with wind, solar, water, etc, but pragmatism will probably ask of us to use a mix of both renewable and nuclear, especially if AI data-centers hog enough power for us all to live in the tech-surveillance world desired by our genocidal, children-r*ping Epstein classes.
Hm. I guess some technazis ought to get luigied. For ecological reasons, of course, nothing personal. We could also upcycle them to compost.
pros:
- High ouput
cons:
- overall extremely expensive (you’ll pay the govt. subsidies too, also the cleaning up after 50+ years)
- strategic target
- risk for population with “oversights” (big-money attracts corruption) *
- “fuel”:
- geopolitical dependencies (mainly russia)
- even getting it is a ecological disaster (and its fans then call it “clean energy”)
- radioactive + toxic waste problem still not solved
All in all, it is a great excuse to have the expensive infrastructure for nukes and submarines (see France).
* the stories i know only from the rather thorough & proper countries Switzerland, Germany, France… it’s crazy.
Don’t want it, don’t need it. The nuclear furnace in space provides free fuel. What we need is massive storage. That’s the next real battle.
People will argue that we don’t have the tech yet. Well, we never have the tech until someone develops it. Do you suppose a chicken laid a nuclear plant? No, it was developed over time. So will energy storage.
The nuclear everyone is afraid of was from an era where priorities 1-9 were making plutonium for nukes or justifying massive uranium centrifuge farms for making weapons grade material.
Priority #10 was making safe electricity. It honestly was more of a waste product from making nukes instead of the point of the plant… It’s not a coincidence that nuclear build out matches the cold war era perfectly. Once the cold war ended the US and allies didn’t need more nukes to make weapons with… The priority became stabilizing the Petro dollar, which nuclear helps undermine by decoupling nations from being dependant on USD and US treasuries.
Fast reactors and LFTRs are god awful for nuclear weapons (why they weren’t made beyond pilot plants or a few examples that exist purely to complicate my point) but are some of the safest designs for new gen IV reactors.
Fast reactors literally burn nuclear waste from Gen 2 plants…
Liquid core reactors can be built in two halves—the heat retaining high reactivity core, and the heat dissipating passively safe container you drain into in an emergency through a freeze plug. That plug works as long as gravity doesn’t go away.
Fast reactor waste is safe in 300-500 years, and they can actually be designed to run on existing nuclear waste as fuel. Even the stuff we can’t burn currently that has half lives in the hundreds of thousands of millions of years.
Thorium breeder reactors are the future for long term base load stability I think. Its not the only solution to our energy needs though but it’s a very attractive option.
I agree to this.
And I will add a strategic note. Power on demand is very important as an asset. You can in fact blot out the sun, a volcano eruption of significant magnitude would do that naturally and no amount of storage would be enough. Wind isn’t always available. Strategically and experimentally we need to be able to go “okay now 10x it!” .
It’s too bad we don’t have great ways to get power from waves yet. I am all for spreading out our dependence over multiple sources, but to not have the means when they fail is to rely on diplomacy and even more infrastructure.
I’m curious how far along Rolls Royce is, are any of those smr’s running yet?
Yeah I agree. It is a shame about wave energy too but I think we’ll eventually figure it out. The downside is to get meaningful energy without beating the crap out of your equipment (using giant waves) you end up needing to cover huge areas with wave generators.
Ironically hydro power and nuclear are natural partners when combined with other renewables.
Nuclear covers the base load generation, and hydro trims up the remaining power production to perfectly meet demand and condition power on the grid. When renewables begin over producing the dam can ramp down to its minimum flow to meet its water license, allowing the reservoir to fill.
I think it’s going to be a constellation of solutions to replace our current energy sources. One of the most important I’ve been watching is soapstone thermal batteries. You can massively over build solar and wind if you know there’s a bunch of soapstone thermal batteries to act as demand for it.
During overproduction you turn resistive heaters inside those soapstone batteries on progressively until the grid stabilizes. Germany actually had (has? I’m not sure if they still do it) something like this for water heaters using frequency sensitive relays to help stabilize grid production. If the grid frequency started to climb relay after relay would activate adding more and more heating load to soak up demand to stabilize the grid.
If we did the same for industrial users who currently burn natural gas, or even a thermal battery to provide district heating for towns and cities using cheap overproduced renewables, you can replace a huge amount of natural gas for nuclear, hydro, and renewable peak shaving.
Thanks for your addition and insights
It’s such an interesting field, infrastructure and power management. One of the best things I look forward too in life is to see how far we can get as a species before I kick the bucket. And I don’t have to to anything, it keeps evolving. I hope we never see war.
Have a good weekend
I don’t think the technicals even matter.
What matters now is:
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Popular public perception.
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Incentives for decision makers.
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And lobbying funds to sway both.
And this makes it tricky:
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Fission looks bad to a layman. It’s scary, and failures and the waste feel dangerous no matter what the reality is. It’s a perfect fit for social media clickbait too.
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New fission plants are a long term investment. They’re expensive, up front. In other words, they don’t yield any political points before a governor’s or mayor’s or or CEO’s term ends, basically, while even renewables like solar or wind are faster to set up.
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There is a sizable nuclear lobby. This is a plus. But Oil will crush it like a bug if it gets “too big” and appreciably threatens petro power.
So as much as I love it, I thinks the best we can hope for in most regions is “recommissioning old plants.”
And to be clear, fusion is a completely different category to me.
I think it’s a waste of precious funds, and is “hopium” for the public. It’s theoretically interesting, but even with a breakthrough, in best-case scenarios, it’s still gonna be expensive to maintain and have many drawbacks. Some are even worse than fission (like more extreme neutron radiation irradiating and eroding components, and stupendously high up-front costs).
I think the funds would be better allocated towards maser drilling for geothermal and cheaper solar cells. And these would yield quicker political points, too, like coal/gas plants quickly converted to geothermal, or mass produced, cheap “backyard solar” the average person can buy and make money with.
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From the US:
Nuclear power represents the intermediate stage between hydrocarbon/petrochemical/fossil fuels and fully renewable (solar/wind/geothermal) energy; an eventual full transition to nuclear power, even as a de facto stopgap until renewable energy infrastructure can handle the power demands of today, is ultimately the correct course of action, especially if the intention is to reduce and ultimately eliminate CO2 & other greenhouse gas emissions to slow global warming & climate change.
