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?
I would gladly live next door to a nuclear plant
It’s safer than living next to a coal fired power plant!
I like it and want to see it spread. I think if you tally up all the deaths indirectly caused by air pollution from fossil fuels they’ll exceed the people killed in nuclear accidents by orders of magnitude.
By a very very large magnitude. And when you factor in stuff like mining deaths and industrial accidents, nuclear kills less people than wind (per kwh) but solar is slightly better than nuclear.
I think it’s good to have, I don’t think we should push it above renewables though, I think it should be in addition to renewables, to fill in the gaps. Batteries and pumped hydro would be better but they have drawbacks of course.
I doubt it’s going to happen here in Australia though. There is way too much public pushback. Our right wing party went into the last election trying to push nuclear as the solution to climate change and that election was a disaster for them.
Still about 70% coal and gas, big oof. Nuclear would help a lot, especially because Australia has one of the largest uranium reserves.
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.
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.
I’m glad someone brought up the land use issue. A nuclear power plant is a pretty compact thing, for the amount of power it’s creating.
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.
To be fair, there’s waste issues with end of life for solar and wind too. No matter what solution we go with, we need a way to deal with the waste (recycling is probably the best option, but storage for nuclear waste doesn’t actually take up that much space. For solar/wind, it’s going to have to be recycling or a huge ass landfill).
They aren’t nearly as unsafe as people think they are and I think they are completely fine.
BUT it still doesn’t make sense to build them, because renewables (especially solar) is so much cheaper, so we should focus all our energy on expanding that instead of nuclear.
Nuclear is good for many reasons except it’s not good for anyone when there still is geopolitical and military instability. I don’t know much other than what can be read on Wikipedia and other popular information sources.
I like the idea of nuclear power, but I think the cost is not justified as it is currently implemented.
Now, the cost for nuclear power can come down. The Trump admin already reduced the cost for setting up nuclear power plants in the US, but that cost reduction comes with increased risk. The reason why I would be fine living near a nuclear power plant, is because the whole thing is designed and run with safety as the first priority. If you haven’t yet, check out the Smarter Everyday video Destin filmed inside a nuclear power plant. You can tell from watching the video that safety at that plant is a constantly improving process, and it comes at a cost. Extra concrete to protect the building, extra environmental studies to look for contamination, round the clock armed security… All these things make nuclear power safer, and they are all things that every investor and board member would love to cut to make some extra margin on their billion dollar power project. TBF, I don’t think the profit/rent seeking line-go-up management and political culture in the US today is condusive to running safe and reliable nuclear power, and I would much rather see our power come from lower-consequence renewables.
You hit the nail on the head, my friend. I’m always telling the people I work with that part of our job is to verify what the utility says they are doing. Not because we don’t trust the people we work with, but because we can’t trust their bosses.
Also, I’m going to check out the video you mentioned, but as someone who has been in several plants… Yes, they really care about safety. To an almost annoying degree. Like, even in the hallways you’re not supposed to walk and look at your phone screen because it’s a safety hazard. Which, sure, but it’s an office and I have emails to read, you know?
That’s exactly my fear, that some money-obsessed person may decide safety costs too much.
There’s a great story from the Fukushima response that is basically this exact thing. Plant operator (I think it was…) got told by some bigwig not to put seawater in the ractor because it would scuttle the reactor and it could never be used again. Guy ordered it done anyway because they didn’t have fresh water and the reactor needed water over it to prevent total meltdown.
It would have been a good transition source of power away from fossil fuels 15 years ago with further development while we build out a renewable infrastructure. Now, best I can see it as backup for some areas of the country.
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.
It is confusing! I’ll add my understanding and it will probably be different than other things you’ve heard, but I’ll add it anyway.
The NRC (for the US) is the regulator. They have ultimate authority to inspect all nuclear power plants. Sometimes the state does as well, depends on the state’s agreement with the NRC. But ultimately it’s the NRC. Every power plant has an NRC inspector whose job it is to look for infractions and make sure the plant is doing all the things. They obviously can’t be everywhere at once, so there’s a bunch of other stuff the plants have to do to prove they are following all the rules. There is currently a huge regulatory burden on nuclear power plant operators and owners. Good. It should be that way for small modular reactors but it remains to be seen of they’ll be able to get away with less safe practices (my bet is yes, at least under the current administration).
Waste is complicated. The US government made a deal a long time ago with the utilities building the plants that they’d provide a place for waste storage, and they haven’t, so they’ve been sued. They’ll just keep getting sued and have to pay the utilities back (the utilities pay for the waste location by paying the gov… It’s weird). There are some attempts being made to have a private company (or companies) take over storing the waste. It’s complicated, and still requires us to transport the waste, which is also complicated. That being said, the DOE has been doing transuranic waste transportation for ages (irradiated junk in barrels) It’s called WIPP and they move all the contaminated crap to a salt mine in NV. It’s not easy, but it can be done.
As for loosing any of the waste… Yeah, if you lose the actual waste that’s very bad and NRC very mad at you. But the irradiated junk? Eh, the government loses shit all the time. Irradiated junk isn’t great, but it’s probably not killing you. Probably not.
And as for who’s profiting? Who knows? It’s like George Carlin said. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.
The cool thing about wind and solar power generation is that you could build one in your backyard.
For nuclear power that is seriously frowned upon.
Give it time. Maybe one day we’ll be able to buy a kit. (For internet purposes, this is a j o k e)
I’d rather solar at this point.
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.
It’s not a well-reasoned feeling, I’m sure if I saw the numbers on the energy production vs cost etc., I could form a better opinion on it. As-is I will support both nuclear and solar, since they’re both clearly better than fossil fuels.
