Nuclear Power Was Once Shunned at Climate Talks. Now, It’s a Rising Star.
Nuclear Power Was Once Shunned at Climate Talks. Now, It’s a Rising Star.
Growing worldwide energy demand and other factors have shifted the calculus, but hurdles still lie ahead.
Yeah, because it'll tie budgets up for ten years building it, and in the meantime all the fossil fuel people can tap those final nails into our coffin while they line their pockets.
Ten years? More like twenty. Hinkley point C was started in 2013, supposed to be finished 2023. This year the estimation was corrected to 2029-2031.
Counterpoint: UAE went from zero nuclear energy to producing as much as Denmark or Portugal produce renewables in ten years. From a base of zero nuclear expertise in the country.
And even if they do finally build it, it's still a centralized system that regulatory-captured monopoly utilities can gouge the public on.
Solar and wind threaten them by being decentralized as well as by not relying on fossil fuels.
Centralized power is perfectly fine if your power is state run.
After all, natural monopolies should be socialized and run at cost.
And with the advent of small modular reactors, you can even decentralize your power.
A small reactor can have a building the size of gas station can power a small city, and the reactor will be small enough that it's literally impossible for it to melt down.
Sadly, regulations in the US (and many US allied nations) incentivise large and large plants that take forever to build and require custom parts which drive up the cost even more.
Moving transport entirely over to the energy grid is going to take more energy than we currently generate - who'd of thought!
Perfect. Now that renewable technology is finally cheap and quick to build, the oil and gas lobby is trying to redirect attention to nuclear, which takes decades to build in most places.
We can do both. There’s nothing preventing us from doing both, and the most effective way for the oil and gas lobby to get what they want is to divide us.
If pro-renewable people say “we must only have renewables, nothing else!” It makes us seem like ideologues. If we seem like ideologues, moderates get confused because they think “well I do like to hedge my bets and try all things out.” And pro-nuclear advocates (who are all over the spectrum) get louder, complain more, and swing more moderates and politicians back toward nuclear and away from renewables. Then you can repeat the cycle in reverse.
The conservative trick is not to substitute something that doesn’t work for something that does. It’s to keep us divided, blaming each other, and going back and forth between different solutions so often that we never get anything done. Chaos is a ladder.
Honestly, as long as fossil fuels are more expensive nobody's going to stop the transition, anyway.
They can do whatever they want. They're still going to get undercut.
If America hadn't responded to Chernobyl with fear of atomic power and instead adopted a "this is why communism will fail, look how much better we can do it" attitude, the climate crisis would be a non-issue right now
Don't forget about three mile island. I think much spin on the Chernobyl situation can be attributed to the embarrassment of the self failure
As an engineer, Chernobyl is terrifying. It was close to being 10x worse than it was. The thought that capitalism could do it better is the height of hubris. If you think your technology is fail-safe, nature (including humans) will find a better way to fail.
There are many reasons besides safety that nuclear makes no sense. Others have listed them here. But this recent hand-waving away of safety is frightening. Saying that our technology today is so much better while anti-intellectualism is running rampant. Saying facilities could always be staffed by experts while our political system is more unstable than ever. Thinking that we could store waste for 10,000 years when humanity has never built something that has intentionally survived a fraction of that time.
The downside of this equation is just too severe. Nuclear plants are uninsurable for a reason, and by default are insured by the public. That cost is ignored in the equation, because it's too large for even the biggest insurance conglomerates to consider.
Because we were determined to phase out fossil fuels at the time?
About fucking time.
We've postponed nuclear for +40 years, causing climate change to get further and further out of hands.
Thanks Greenpeace /s
Greenpeace funded by the Rockefeller family trust. Literally.
And Friends of the Earth funded by Atlantic Oil.
The 1970s were full of oil companies throwing money at environmental groups who were anti-nuclear.
Except the money kept rolling in for decades.
How disappointing.
Renewables and storage are far superior, in almost every conceivable metric it’s not funny.
Yet we let conservatives hype up nuclear garbage and carbon recapture as the solution to climate change.
I just don’t see it in terms of fundamentals. We’ve heard this for years, yet countries that have denuclearized have not been able to go full renewables, they have become more dependent on fossil fuels. Storage has just not been able to keep up with demand, baseload is still necessary, and we don’t have other options.
We should absolutely keep investing in renewables and pushing forward, they help. There is no reason at the same time to prevent investment in nuclear and other non-carbon emitting solutions, and if tech companies are willing to foot the bill we shouldn’t complain. Every gigawatt counts at this point.
We’ve heard this for years, yet countries that have denuclearized have not been able to go full renewables, they have become more dependent on fossil fuels.
Which countries are you referring to? Germany for example denuclearized and replaced them with renewables, they didn't become more dependent on fossil fuels (even if people like to say that).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File%3AGermany_electricity_production.svg
Storage has just not been able to keep up with demand
The thing is that things are evolving incredibly fast in this space. Renewables have gone from being more expensive than the alternatives to being the cheapest option by a large margin in the span of a decade, and prices are still plummeting. This trend can be observed for both renewables (solar/wind) and different storage technologies. The reason we're not seeing them online at a large scale yet is that they've quite simply just recently become economical to do so. Nuclear does very much not have this property - it trends towards being more expensive over time. Given how long these projects take to build, it's not out of the question that they will have to shut down on account of being just way too expensive in comparison once the projects are finished.
There is no reason at the same time to prevent investment in nuclear and other non-carbon emitting solutions, and if tech companies are willing to foot the bill we shouldn’t complain. Every gigawatt counts at this point.
I generally agree with this - any private actor that wants to build nuclear completely on their own dime and at their own risk should be able to do so. The problem is that this is not what's happening - these companies often get government funding for these initiatives, which displace investments that could otherwise be going to other more viable solutions.
Take Sweden for example, where the right wing government campaigned on renewables being too woke and that nuclear is the only option. The way they are making nuclear happen is by guaranteeing financing at favourable terms, plus offering guaranteed pricing of the output electricity for these plants. This is going to be massively expensive for tax payers, and is actively making it so that other renewables are not getting built.
Since nuclear takes so much time to build out and is so unviable from a financial perspective, it's also used as an excuse by fossil fuel interests, that get to stay in business comparatively longer in a scenario where the world tries to pursue nuclear vs where the world pursues renewables.
This is why nuclear support should generally be met with skepsis.
yeah here come the nukes. They missed all the fun and now they think it just makes sense.
I used to be pro-nuclear and I am still not worried about the safety issue. However, fissile material is still a finite resource and mining for it is an ecological disaster, so I no longer am in favor of it.
As someone who isn't well versed on the topic, is the impact from mining fissile material worse than the impact of mining the stuff we need for batteries and storage of renewable? Big fan of renewables, and not trying to start some shit. Trying to learn. Lol
fissile material is still a finite resource
We have reserves that will last centuries, and it can literally be extracted from seawater just like lithium if the economics allow for it. Can't comment on the mining impact, though. Is it any worse than rare earth metals?
There is no economical way to extract fissile material from sea water. This is no different from people saying you can mine gold that way. Technically, yes. Practically, no.
The only way we know to get the uranium necessary for reactors in the quantities we need to do it is to mine it. And we don't even have enough to mine to last for a century at current consumption.
The world's present measured resources of uranium (6.1 Mt) in the cost category less than three times present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for about 90 years.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium
Sure, maybe some new practical way to make a reactor without uranium or to find uranium elsewhere might happen. But that's a MIGHT. With what we know now, we need uranium and we need to mine it and there isn't enough.
Most human acticity requires some degree of mining. Lithium, copper, uranium etc. The impact of that however pales in comparison to the sheer volumes of land that are destroyed by climate change and fossil fuel extraction. Besides, when mines finally do shut down they often become havens for wildlife.
People who think Nuclear is very safe and impossible to fuck up forget they will have a government department called Doge being run by a fuckwit
Nuclear plants are far from the only public hazard if he's actually going to go into places and derail them personally.
From November 15.
Plus ruzzians are shooting Ukraine with hyper rockets.
Fuck
Thats what happens when they become more financially viable. Shouldn't really surprise anybody.
Why would they be more financially viable now?
Because cost of megawatt-hour via nuclear power plant decreases every year. EVERY YEAR.
The reason the USA shut down old nuclear power plants decades ago was because they were very expensive. Some of those old reactors were recently acquired by Microsoft in the expectation that rising power demand (and therefor price) would make them viable again.
I'm sure the EU is expecting similar shifts in financial viability as the Russian aggression drags on, eliminating natural gas imports availability.
