Comment by m101
5 months ago
I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. Nuclear power was always the greenest, most climate friendly, safest, cheapest (save for what we do to ourselves), most energy dense, most long lasting, option.
> I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place.
The context is a long string of nuclear incidents throughout the Cold War through to the ‘90s.
Not just Chernobyl, not just Fukushima, but the string of disasters at Windscale / Sellafield and many others across the globe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
These disasters were huge, newsworthy and alarmingly regular. People read about those getting sick and dying directly as a result. They felt the cleanup costs as taxpayers. They saw how land became unusable after a large event, and, especially terrifying for those who had lived as adults through Cold War, saw the radioactive fallout blown across international borders by the wind.
It’s not Greenpeace or an anti-nuclear lobby who caused the widespread public reaction to nuclear. It was the public reaction seeing it with their own eyes, and making an understandable decision that they didn’t like the risks.
Chernobyl was one hammer blow to the coffin lid, Fukushima the second, but nuclear power was already half-dead before either of those events, kept alive only by unpopular political necessity.
I’m not even anti-nuclear myself, but let’s be clear: the worldwide nuclear energy industry is itself to blame for the lack of faith in nuclear energy.
Coal kills far more people than nuclear yet you never read about it. I think partly because any nuclear catastrophes are visible and concentrated to a single area.
Coal smoke kills over a much wider area and this impacts that 'newsworthiness' of this fear to spread. It's a class data vs feelings issue and yet again peoples feelings trump the data and undermines what experts familiar with both the danger and the data say.
Don't judge plane safety from the design of the brothers Wright aircraft
Fun fact: in the 90's, the reference gauge for aircraft safety was 1 accidental fatality per 100 million hours of passenger flight. Which is amazingly safe, far better than car and on a par with train.
Now, facing the growth of air travel, it was decided to raise this bar to 1 per billion hour. Not as an end by itself - this comes at very high cost and had a significant impact on travel prices. But because, with the growth of air travel, this would have implied one major accident per fortnight on average. And because those accident are more spectacular and relayed by media, civil aviation authorities feared this might raise angst and deter the public from air travel.
So, safety was enhanced, but mostly for marketing reasons.
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It's absolutely insane how safe we've managed to make plane travel considering all the variables involved.
Statistically, taking a flight from NYC to London is safer than walking from 5th avenue to 4th avenue in Midtown Manhattan.
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But how much does a modern jet cost, including insurance? Compared to an armada of solar driven mini drones?
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And yet if you look at the "Fatalities" column, you see a stream of zeroes with a handful of non-zeroes, the worst being Chernobyl at 50 direct fatalities. Rooftop solar accounts for more deaths.
Nuke plants are scary when they fail, but the actual threat is way lower than we play it out to be.
I'm open to Nuclear if it can be done safely and if we can show we have the cultural maturity to keep it safe...but in the case of Chernobyl at least I think that statistics and other officious BS has been used to greatly downplay the true human cost in death, sickness, displacement and on many other metrics.
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It's not just about deaths. That's the thing. People can get sick, the environment gets polluted. A whole town got pulled out of their flats and was never allowed back. The area will remain closed for generations.
Counting deaths does not do the actual damage justice.
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> Rooftop solar accounts for more deaths.
On the other hand, me falling of my roof, isn't going to put sheep farmers livelihoods at risk 1,800 miles away
Most importantly if you scale fatalities by power generated Nuclear is one of the best (last I checked only bested by solar). Coal generates releases way more radiation into the environment and has way more deaths during mining.
People are irrationally scared by large incidents and under-represent the regular deaths and costs that occur during operation.
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Yes, that’s my point. They are scary - memorably so - in a way that very few other forms of power generation are. The closest equivalent I can think of is a major hydroelectric dam breaking.
Also remember that at each major incident, despite the failures that led to it, people fought tirelessly, in several cases sacrificing themselves, to reduce the scope of the disaster. Each of them could have potentially been worse. We are lucky in that the worst case death figures have not been added to the statistics.
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Why you would be downvoted for mentioning this is beyond me. The numbers are well documented and hold up. Compared to every other major source of energy production, nuclear has the lower rate of fatalities by far, by any metric, and this despite it being far from a minor source of power globally.
Not only that, but it also produces less radioactive leakage than many other kinds of power sources that depend on resource mining on a large scale (looking at coal plants in particular here)
>50 direct fatalities
This is a crazy understatement of just how many human-years of life have been lost due to that incident. How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short. I am amazed this isn't more widely known, and I always find it suspicious when people downplay the real extent of the damage that has been done, to human lives.
Just saying that only 50 people died is pretty messed up in my opinion.
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People fear what the media tells them to fear. I still remember the (publicly funded so not really independent from government) TV here having someone refer to a beech near Fukushima as "possibly one of the most dangerous places on earth" while holding up a Geiger counter that showed radiation levels barely above background levels.
Nuclear accidents have been a nothing-burger compared to all the deaths and health issues caused by coal and gas - but those are more spread out over time and don't make for as exciting news so no one cares. Shutting down nuclear instead of coal was never a rational decision but an emotional one.
Okay, my reflection is as follows. Investing in nuclear power today is a bit akin to betting against solar/wind + battery. In my opinion it is a losing bet.
For a nuclear powerplant to be economically feasible, it first needs to be built (10+ years at this point), and then run for tens of years at consistent output rates. To make this worth it for investors, the state often guarantees the price for energy for tens of years after construction, picking up the difference if the electricity price falls.
So in essence, building a nuclear power plant today is locking in that price of electricity for something like 50 years. Solar is today already much cheaper than nuclear, and is coming down in price very quickly, as are batteries and other storage methods. If this development continues and there are further breakthroughs in storage, the taxpayer would have to keep footing the bill to buy expensive nuclear energy for years in the future.
Therefore, instead of investing in reviving nuclear, I would much rather invest the same amount in upgrading the grid, researching storage methods, and subsidizing grid-scale solar and wind. I think this will be the better choice for the taxpayer in the long run.
I am against nuclear energy because my government is deeply corrupted and give contracts to their friends. They also appoint unqualified people to the highest positions to award them big salaries and the results are catastrophic tragedies with tens of casualties each time. I don’t trust them to operate the railroads, why would I trust them to operate a nuclear facility?
This is the main reason why I am, generally speaking, against nuclear as a universal solution.
A question for pro-nuclear folks: Would you be okay with having a highly corrupt low HDI country building nuclear facilities (conversion and deconversion, enrichment, power plants) next to your borders?
This is similar to the reasoning of Austria vehemently opposing nuclear reactors to be built in neighbouring countries, even if downstream on the Danube, even if 200 km from their border.
The latest decision (although on the surface, not on an environmental issue like the article is about, but on state aid measures - but actually not the real reason for Austria's opposition): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62...
So, I believe, yes, low HDI countries with high corruption do have the right to build nuclear facilities. This is not like a combination of low HDI and high corruption index awarded by some international organization has the approval rights to such questions of sovereignity. There is a whole range of special regulation regarding who can build nuclear stations and under what conditions, with a special agency to ensure the safe use (IAEA) - that should be the only criteria for letting nations build nuclear stations, not corruption, HDI or how rich the countries are.
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They are more likely to cause more damage, just less visibly, in building substandard fossil fuel plants.
Absolutely. Just stop using LWR as the blueprint.
So you would oppose an entire, globe-spanning branch of deeply necessary technology (clean energy) with all its vast opportunities for improvement, innovation, and management under all kinds of more responsible means, because the government functionaries in your specific part of the world can't get their moral shit together (and given what you describe, wouldn't be able to do it well no matter what kid of large-scale energy is put into their hands)?
They're concerned about the safety of corrupt management. Several posters here reassure that Chernobyl etc. were poorly managed and that we've learned a lot since then. But ongoing corruption doesn't instill confidence that learnings will be incorporated safely.
Saying that catastrophes have been uncommon over decades is also not reassuring as one would expect catastrophes to increase if we go from not building and decommissioning to rapid building and recommissioning.
Maybe the upper limit of atomic power catastrophe is still a low casualty count. In that case we shouldn't reassure people that we've learned and improved and instead show that even rampantly corrupt administration cannot do much harm, if that's the case.
No. I only vote in my country. Other countries can do as they see fit.
This is true regardless of how the electron potential is generated.
I was involved in the nuclear industry in the 90's.
Why impose externalities on others when solar and wind are so cheap and less risky? It seems like proponents fall for technological aspirationalism without considering pragmatic consequences and risks of shoveling enormous sums of money for unnecessary risks and inefficient allocations of capital because it's seems just barely unobtainable or blocked by "them" when it's simply economically unviable.
And it's selective technological aspirationalism. Why is unbounded optimism appropriate for nuclear but not for renewables? The engineering principle of KISS says renewables should be much more improvable, as indeed the data indicates they are.
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I disagree with cheapest. If you factor in twenty years build time and nuclear waste disposal, the whole thing is not economically viable.
Then there's a problem with nuclear fuel. The sources are mostly countries you don't want to depend on.
You are of course right with your assessment that nuclear is green, safe and eco-friendly. That's a hard one to swallow for a lot of eco activists.
It is expensive because of the regulatory burdens associated with making it unreasonably safe. By unreasonably safe I mean that harms predicted by radiation models are unscientific, and death rate expectations are far lower than alternative power generation technologies.
Nuclear fuel storage is relatively straightforward, and volumes have potential to be reduced 30x through recycling.
Nuclear power plants require international laws and international cooperation for insurance, because one serious incident, such as Chornobyl, can wipe a continent.
In Ukraine, profits from all nuclear plants will cover damages, caused by Chornobyl, in 1000-5000 years IF nothing more will happen to Chornobyl or other an other nuclear power plant in those years, which is unlikely.
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> harms predicted by radiation models are unscientific,
Where are your scientific alternative models?
Long build times are often the result of constantly changing regulations. Also it’s interesting that build times in Japan are almost 2 times smaller than in US.
Nuclear doesn't have a great record in other countries either. I might have the wrong figures but Hinkley Points C is over 2 times over budget and likely to be 5+ years late.
The exemption being France and maybe China?
France did a programme of nuclear power stations rather than the 1 or 2 offs that seem to be the norm elsewhere and that seems to have worked pretty well.
I'd be surprised if HPC is competitive with solar + wind + BESS when it comes online but I could well be wrong
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but comparing to solar / wind there you also have to factor batteries production, battery replacement, wind turbine replacement and recycling (they are not easily recyclable), cleaning solar panels etc.
'recyclable' is such a vague term. E.g. radiation-affected typically easily recycled materials are very hard to deal with (think e.g. pipe steel from power plants) and are effectively non-recyclable, instead of close to 100% recyclable, as their non-contaminated counterparts.
Opposed to that, battery recycling is mostly hard to deal with in terms of economics, and admittedly the chemistry involved is complex, but at least from a technical point of view, plenty of solutions are available - and the tech is coming in relatively quickly now that the demand is there (remember, first generation EVs are just now getting closer to EOL).
It's slightly amusing that recycling of a wind turbine is treated as if it was a big deal - yes the laminated rotor parts can't be part of circular economies, but the total material amount of this laughably small. All the metal components are very easily recycled.
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They are easily recyclable. Nuclear isn’t, unless of course you have a 24/7 protected and monitored by 100’s of people storage place to keep all that safe for the next 10000 years. Very ‘cheap’ indeed.
From a technical point of view, nuclear waste is a solved problem. The issue is political.
Ibidem for the fuel: yes, you can depends on wild countries; You can also depends on Australia, Canada and India, which seems like not-so-bad countries (in my opinion);
> From a technical point of view, nuclear waste is a solved problem
When it comes to nuclear waste repositories real experts official publish: "Internationally, it is understood that there is no reliable scientific basis for predicting the process or likelihood of inadvertent human intrusion."
Source: https://international.andra.fr/sites/international/files/201...
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Solved problem? Have you ever waited 10000 years to see if the waste really decomposes and the area where it was stored is safe for kids to play?
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How is it not economically viable given it is actively used since multiple decades in France? I also disagree with saying it is the cheapest, in practice it is actually pretty expensive compared to solar and wind, but economically nuclear makes a lot of sense, it fits a really good role in the grid
Just that it is used does not mean it is economically viable if the government is deeply involved - which is the case in France.
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Until we solve the long-term energy storage problem that renewable sources have, we're going to need a backup of some sort. Something you can turn up late at night in the middle of winter.
So far the cleanest solution we've come up with is gas plants, but gas plants made Europe extremely dependent on Russia. The alternatives are oppressive regimes or the US, which has been starting trade wars seemingly out of boredom.
Nuclear fuel, on the other hand, is exported not only by Kazachstan, but also Canada and Australia. In terms of "countries you don't want to depend on", I'd rather have Canada than Qatar.
I'm not sure if the economics still work out if you factor in the ineffective, half-assed Russian sanctions that have Europe fund Russia's war economy. The only alternative is probably coal, but only if you don't hold coal to the same standards in terms of waste disposal and nuclear exposure of the public as nuclear plants.
Nuclear isn't cheap, in part because it's become a niche market only some countries still participate in, but the politics and large-scale economics aren't as bad as the anti-nuclear crowd make them seem. They'd probably be bad for America, because the mighty oil industry stands to lose money and they'd need to import their fuel, but for countries already importing their fuel the balance is completely different.
Infuriatingly, the crowd that wants to do something about global warming also seems to think every nuclear reactor is going full Chernobyl within the decade. All of the parties I even consider voting for are staunch anti-nuclear activists for no documented reason other than "we don't like it".
> we're going to need a backup of some sort. Something you can turn up late at night in the middle of winter.
AFAICT this is not really nuclear. They excel at constant production, not switch ability to fill in around renewables.
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sure state funded solar panel that you need to change every 10 year and batteries with rare minerals are cheaper.
Not true, lifetime is longer and there are no rare earth elements in battery cells themself. Rare earth are not really rare btw.
Solar panels can now last as far as 30 years.
The reason to be against nuclear energy is quite simple - human error.
Unlike flying, we’ve not shown nuclear energy to be sufficiently idiot-proof for many people to be comfortable with it. That and the fact that radiation is invisible, which makes it somehow almost paranormal.
The main problem of course is that coal is killing much more people than any nuclear disaster ever did (per unit of energy delivered).
But because it’s so spread and so normalised and not so bombastic, we don’t even consider it.
The number of lives saved by using nuclear energy is easily in the tens of thousands even with disasters like Chernobyl.
Although of course it has to be stated that the USSR moved to heaven and earth to solve the problem… and if they hadn’t, then the entire continent might be dead today.
And brown bears are less dangerous than cars because fewer people are killed by them. If you see a car, RUN. They are dangerous. Brown bears, not so much. Go ahead, pat their fur, statistically this is safe.
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So far it was either the cheapest or the safest.
Also, solar is now both cheaper and safer.
but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany).
And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
A look at destatis tells me something else for Germany (in 2024): Solar has a share of 15 %, and wind 28 %. In total 57 % of the produced energy comes from renewable sources. (https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...)
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60% of that energy is lost as waste heat and doesn't need replaced as we decarbonise and electrify.
For already developed nations predictions are for electricity to double but energy use to halve at the same time as they electrify end uses.
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Yes, but all that can be taken into account in the analysis, and renewables and storage have become so cheap they're now the superior option.
Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations. I wonder if some of the reactionary takes trying to promote nuclear are a consequence of that. I think you're average far right type is not going to be comfortable living in a relative energy ghetto.
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During summer french nuclear power plants reduced their energy production because there were problems with cooling caused by heat and drought. So we probably need mixture of all those technologies to make electrical grid stable. Even nuclear energy is not imune to climate change.
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Existing nuclear, fine but new nuclear isn’t going to work, it takes way too long to build. Solar is just plug in and go.
Have you ever heard of batteries?
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Yep, the data suggests that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
And some of those data seems sane: the cost of solar panels reduces due to tech improvements: ok
The cost of coal increases a bit, maybe due to geopolicital issues: ok, seems legit
The cost of nuclear increases .. why ? Why the step between 2016 and 2017 ? Does tech "de-improved" ?
More insights would be interesting
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This doesn't measure the cost of providing dispatchable electricity though. If I want 1MWh of electricity at night provided by solar, it's going to cost more than solar's LCoE because I will also need to pay for a way to store and dispatch it.
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Nuclear at $6,000-12,000/kW installed capacity becomes cheaper than solar+battery somewhere between 1-3 days of required backup.
> solar is now both cheaper and safer.
apples and oranges
Not at night
From the top of my head, for about 300 nuclear power plants around the globe, there have been 3 core meltdown accidents. It is a 1% catastrophic failure rate. It is quite bad!
Whatever the circumstances of these accidents, human nature and unexpected events allowed them to occur. Just like every accident, you can say after the fact they could have been avoided. However it is impossible to revert the consequences of a core meltdown at human time scale.
I am not anti-nuclear at all. But I certainly wonder what kind of organization is required to operate it safely.
Meanwhile coal power alone is causing 60 deaths per day (20k per year). And that’s a conservative NIH number, not a biased nuclear industry estimate.
3 meltdowns in the past 60 years with minimal loss of life (even including Chernobyl, an outlier for so many reasons), is a massively safer alternative than the status quo.
See my brown bear vs car comparison above/below.
Also, solar causes less deaths, according to your counting method.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
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Total amount of reactor*years so far is roughly 20000. 3 core meltdowns amounts for 0.015% per reactor per year.
How about because spent nuclear fuel will be hazardous to humans for the next ~20 thousand years? How do you amortize that cost? You can't just assume someone else will deal with it and call that cost savings. People talk about burying it but in reality it sits in containment vessels above ground and the more there is the higher the cost to deal with it so the less likely it ever will be dealt with.
Isn't that only applicable for Uranium 235 based reactors? Thorium is converted to Uranium 233 and when split the byproducts have an half life of 10s of years, meaning that the radioactivity drops to safe levels in "only" few hundred years.
This is much more manageable.
Anyway, that is to say that nuclear is a spectrum, and the current mainstream tech I believe it is the one that won because of the military applications (and therefore funding) back in the cold-war era.
I remember the anti-nuclear fever went viral in 2011 after the Fukushima nuclear accident caused by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. I think the correct lesson to be learned from that experience is not to built nuclear power plants in places where they can be damaged by natural disasters...and not to call for all nuclear power plants around the world to be shut down.
Or if you build them there, build them so they can withstand that disaster.
There was another similar plant even closer to the epicenter, and it was hit with a (slightly) higher tsunami crest. It survived basically undamaged and even served as shelter for tsunami refugees. Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec. And didn't partially dismantle it to make access easier like what was done in Fukushima.
Oh, and for example all the German plants would also have survived essentially unscathed had they been placed in the exact same spot, for a bunch of different reasons.
> Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec.
If you're referring to the Onagawa plant, one engineer (Yanosuke Hirai) pushed for the height of the wall to be increased beyond the original spec:
> A nuclear plant in a neighboring area, meanwhile, had been built to withstand the tsunamis. A solitary civil engineer employed by the Tohoku Electric Power Company knew the story of the massive Jogan tsunami of the year 869, because it had flooded the Shinto shrine in his hometown. In the 1960s, the engineer, Yanosuke Hirai, had insisted that the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station be built farther back from the sea and at higher elevation than initially proposed—ultimately nearly fifty feet above sea level. He argued for a seawall to surpass the original plan of thirty-nine feet. He did not live to see what happened in 2011, when forty-foot waves destroyed much of the fishing town of Onagawa, seventy-five miles north of Fukushima. The nuclear power station—the closest one in Japan to the earthquake’s epicenter—was left intact. Displaced residents even took refuge in the power plant’s gym.
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/12/06/were-design...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanosuke_Hirai
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> Or if you build them there, build them so they can withstand that disaster.
You can't build to withstand humans ignorance. You always can argue to do this or that, but if the responsible managers won't approve it, it's all just theory and good hopes. Even worse if the ignorance grows over time; because the last decades it worked out, surely it will work another decade or two...
That's why things like nuclear are so problematic, because small neglections can explode into cataclysmic events.
I read that Germans watched their local nuclear experts explain on TV what was happening while Japanese authorities were still in denial.
They had a stereotype of Japanese hypercompetence and seeing them fuck up and then try to cover it up in the middle of a disaster had an impact even on traditional nuclear supporters.
> in places where they can be damaged by natural disasters.
And places where they can be damaged by human actions as well.
That leaves so many places to build reactors, right ?
I think human actions are easier to predict and prevent than natural disasters. Earthquakes are the biggest deal breakers.
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I'm not convinced that's true about nuclear power when you look at the full lifecycle costs of uranium mining, maintenance and decommissioning. Also, solar is currently a lot cheaper than nuclear power when you exclude all the various subsidies (which applies to both energy sources). I'm not even convinced that nuclear power is that energy dense when you look at the raw uranium mining - most figures cherry-pick the processed uranium fuel which is indeed a very dense energy source.
We're living in a reality where nuclear waste was not always properly contained and the repercussions of it are long-lasting. While this particular case is related to the Manhattan Project, it's causing all types of issues to this day:
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/09/11/long-term-effects-nu...
I'm still against nuclear and this ruling didn't change it. For me it's still externalising many of the negative effects to many future generations. And with much more spent fuel comes more proliferation risks.
Of course this stuff is not up to me but the parties I vote for are in part because they're anti nuclear.
Or why there is a "clean" energy distinction that some authority has control over in the first place. If CO2 is the thing we care about, then tax CO2 and let everything sort itself out. The fact there are subsidies instead of carbon taxes is revealing all on its own.
I was all for nuclear when it was the best option to displace fossil fuels. It is no longer, so I'm no longer all for it.
This. The time for new nuclear plants was 20 years ago. Now it's too late, and too expensive, even in purely practical terms without the question of safety.
It's a bit more nuanced than this, no? It's better to reflect on why we let important things like nuclear energy go to the lowest bidder, or private entities that want to maximize short term profit.
> most long lasting
...which also applies to nuclear waste unfortunately, and that answers part of your question - e.g. as irrational as it may be, but at least in Germany nobody wants to have a nuclear waste storage in their backyard (the other part of the answer is Chornobyl - and for the same 'not in my backyard' reason).
Also when looking at recent years, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to have a few large nuclear power stations in the middle of Europe, see the 'hostage situation' around the Zaporizhzhia NPP.
When I referenced long lasting I mean that some nuclear power stations are no forecast to keep going for 120 years.
CO2 in the atmosphere is also long lasting, do you have a problem with that type of storage?
Spent nuclear fuel is dangerous to stand near for 500 years (without centimetres of concrete), and then dangerous to consume for an further many thousand. It is within our technology to look after the quantities we are talking about indefinitely.
Also, with current plants we could reduce the size of the waste by 30x if we recycled it. Other plant types would burn all the fuel and leave us with very low volumes of radioactive elements.
Wrt Ukraine you choose to focus on the potential for release around Zaporozhzhia Vs the actual destruction occuring from the circumstances of war in the rest of the country?
> CO2 in the atmosphere is also long lasting, do you have a problem with that type of storage?
Yes, we have problem with CO2. The solution is to use Solar + Wind + Hydro + Batteries + long lasting storage. Nuclear causes more problems than it solves unless it used to make nukes also.
See that's the thing, you're trying to argue rationally ;)
But the discussion around nuclear energy stopped being rational decades ago. On one side you have the old guard of the environmentalist movement which got started with anti-nuclear protests in the first place and then had their "I told you so" moment in 1986, and on the other side you have that new "nuclear grassroots movement" which tells me that nuclear power is akshually completely safe, and even if an incident happens it's not doing any harm and btw those Chornobyl death numbers are completely overblown, the radiation was actually good for the environment or whatever.
Then I'm seeing that the latest European NPP in Finland was about 15 years late and 3x more expensive than planned (from 3.5 to 11 billion Eu) while wind and solar farms are just popping up everywhere around me without much fanfare, built by whoever has some money and a bit of unused farmland or roof space to spare. And I really can't imagine those same people pooling their money and starting to build nuclear power plants instead ;)
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If we already have to take care of a hole in some mountain for the next few hundred years, why not put 100 times the waste in it?
Nobody would notice the difference.
Storage capacity of high level nuclear waste repositories is limited by heat buildup. I think people would notice when radioactive volcanoes start erupting.
I think Hollywood will remember of something.
The annoying thing is recycling nuclear waste is kind of a solved problem. I've watched this video a while ago but iirc it is just more expensive to build a reactor that can also recycle its own waste. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQ3gFRj0Bc
After decades of R&D and numerous lab and prototypes reactors able to do so (mainly fast breeders)... there is not a single industrial model ready to be deployed.
> at least in Germany nobody wants to have a nuclear waste storage in their backyard
Hello, I live in Germany. You can use my backyard free of charge so long as I get a free Geiger counter, thank you!
I'd genuinely be honored to play such an important role in decarbonising Germany's energy supply. Watching the carbon intensity per kWh on electricitymap.com as we creep towards winter is frankly depressing. (I didn't know this site yet last year, so this is the first time I see the dynamics in action.) The coal plant also never turns off, even during negative prices. I presume it takes too long to fire back up and so there's always >100 grams CO2e for every little kWh that 82 million Germans use. The wind turbines / solar panels need to turn off to make space on the grid for the coal plant when there's oversupply. That's what the Germans were made to vote for in fear when electing to shut their nuclear plants earlier than coal. It's like banning airplanes and having everyone drive cars instead due to a national fear of flying, not having considered the safety records of each method. It's so crazy to me as a Dutch immigrant who's new to these people's politics. Anyway, back to storage
I don't see the problem with inert waste under the ground and a good detection system, at least for a few centuries. There's challenges in how to explain the danger to a generation that doesn't speak any of our languages anymore (in 500 years, someone's gonna need to replace the sign), or who lost any translators we've built (imagining some apocalypse, say in 5000 years), but there's research on that as well and it's not an argument why we couldn't find a good storage site for the next century while we deal with this energy transition
> the other part of the answer is Chornobyl - and for the same 'not in my backyard' reason
And yet there are nuclear plants all over Europe! People who mind can already choose not to live near them. Expand capacity at those sites and let's go
But is very centralised. Solar and wind are less centralised, and I think that’s one advantage they have over nuclear.
Probably said somewhere else, but "green" originally means "does not create toxic waste when used". Nuclear is nice and good for the environment, but it does fit in the definition "produce waste", even if this waste can be considered as small or can be somehow treated.
Well, its wrong though. Its not the cheapest. Thats solar and by a long shot. Nuclear is literally the most expensive energy source. Also take into account the timeframe to build nuclear powerplants. 9 to 12 Years on average built time and delays often happen.
That's blatantly wrong. Hydro stands out in the data as being the cheapest reliable carbon neutral option (wind and solar aren't reliable, and when you factor in storage to make them reliable then they're not cheap).
Hydro requires large sums of capital to get started, destroys entire valleys, is only viable in a limited number of places, has significant risks if not maintained, and isn't energy dense in the slightest. Nevertheless, it's cheap and it's carbon neutral.
Run-of-the-river hydro in all but a handful of sites tends to be quite dependent on rainfall levels. This means production levels can vary quite meaningfully both seasonally and more importantly year-to-year.
It's definitely reliable in the sense that hydro stations can basically last forever if properly maintained (there are plenty of hydro stations operating today which are more than 100 years old) but it's not quite a silver bullet.
You're purposefully and deceptively omitting the lack of safety and perpetual waste risks.
The reason I used to oppose nuclear energy is that its proponents would say nuclear waste isn't a problem, but they would never explain why it isn't a problem. I knew the half-life of uranium was 4 billion years; I didn't see how you could possibly make that safe, and nobody on the pro-nuclear side seemed to have an explanation, so I assumed that no explanation existed.
(Turns out the answer is that you can store nuclear waste deep underground at geologically stable locations where tectonics won't cause it to eventually resurface.)
(Also radioactive waste isn't uranium and the half-life is considerably shorter than 4 billion years, although it's still quite long.)
it’s also true that you get better at using (and reusing) what we would consider waste today over time.
The more energy we are able to use, the more inert the waste material becomes, leading to much lower storage timeframes (though still multiple human lifetimes even in the best case).
I take it you mean well built and well run nuclear plant you.
Also is it most prone to human error?
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Merkel era politics were anything but "woke". It was 15 years of overly conservative policies, stalling economical and societal progress.
ahahahaha. millions of immigrants from middle east are conservative policies. abandoning nuclear is conservative policies too?
Please don't lie
enjoy your companies moving factories to USA/eastern europe to produce.