Sorry but this is the most lunatic comment I’ve seen in a while. Why be careful with anything right? Let’s bring back lead, CFCs and all the stuff we have band because we were careful.
Fact is, Nucular is extremely expensive, hard to control, dangerous and still has no real waste solution.
People pushing for it either just repeat influencers with no own original thought or hoping to make a dollar on the massive subsidies the governments will have to invest, if this becomes a reality.
IMO, any energy plan needs to have reduced consumption as priorities 1-10 and past that nuclear isn’t always worse than renewables.
Let’s bring back lead, CFCs and all the stuff we have band because we were careful
Lead, CFCs, Asbestos and the like have all been banned for consumer use, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Being unhealthy doesn’t mean they have no application and can’t be carefully used.
still has no real waste solution
At scale, neither do renewables. Solar panels are a sandwich of dozens of trace elements, heavy metals, plastic and everything else. Nitpicking nuclear here is silly because the amount of waste generated is the least by an order of magnitude. Keep waste generation under control and its management basically an afterthought.
Nucular is extremely expensive
These conversations always get bogged down in $/kW, which is not what we should be worried about. Nuclear has a lower lifetime carbon footprint than renewables, which is worth the extra spend in our current climate crisis. It’s an important tool for sustainable energy usage; you can’t use renewables as a drop in replacement for everything.
Half the reason it ends up so expensive is because no one has experience building them, and so they always end up over budget when they do get made (at least in the US)
And the danger is vastly overblown. Far more have died as the results of accidents in other power industries then as a result of nuclear. It’s very safe when properly regulated (and not run by clowns aka Chernobyl)
Chernobyl was disastrous because design flaws were not relayed to the plant engineers. It took years of roadblocked research to find out what had happened. Even the man that had helped to design the RBMK reactor did not consider a meltdown was possible because the xenon that ended up poisoning the reactor would burn off under normal circumstances.
The meltdown could have been prevented if not for the soviet government inexplicably withholding critical information about the reactor from it’s own engineers.
Chernobyl also had known design defects the Soviets chose to ignore because they couldn’t admit their precious atomic program was even capable of having a flaw.
And even with those defects, it required a very specific and normally unlikely sequence of events and multiple warnings being ignored before the core melted down.
Back in the 60s airliners crashed far more frequently per passenger mile.
So clearly airliners would never go anywhere.
The problem is the financing, the plants are so expensive they try to wring infinitely money out of old designs, which makes new designs harder to build because the old designs need so much regulation to be safe.
We need to start rolling out 4th Gen reactors like an assembly line, reactors designed to fail safe with almost no risk of release events.
Compare the shitty PWR, or God forbid the RBMK design to a modern PBR, which, if power goes out just fizzles as the water moderator boils off.
The left is so absolutely religious about nuclear power (because of weapons BTW, a fair reason, but it’s being exploited), while the right hate it becausw they own all the fossil fuels.
Don’t forget the more than 200 nuclear powered ships currently puttering their way around the world, both above and below the surface. Not to mention the numerous research and testing reactors that don’t product grid energy.
And that doesn’t even get into things like RTGs used on spacecraft and in extremely remote regions where traditional fuels would be nearly impossible to transport reliably. Not technically a reactor in the traditional sense of what people think of as a reactor there, but nuclear energy all the same. The USSR built more than 1,500 of those alone while they were around.
And even ignoring all of those, alternative reactor designs like Thorium molten salt reactors can’t meltdown if cooling systems fail, because the fuel used doesn’t generate heat requiring constant cooling like that.
The only reason most designs we have in use now are uranium based is because that can be used to create weapons, so that’s where the research went… alternatives like Thorium can’t, despite the fuel being much more abundant.
Yes, but our continued use of fossil fuels will be exponentially more expensive with regards to global warming.
Nuclear power is hard to control, dangerous
No, it is very safe and well known, Chornobyl, TMI and Fukashima are the major accidents in nuclear power, TMI was caused by a badly designed and missunderstood control system, Chornobyl was caused by a bad reactor design combined with a culture of secrecy, Fukashima was caused by a natural disaster combined with a bad location.
We have learned from this and modern nuclear power plants are safe to the point of being boring.
Nuclear power has no real waste solution
This is just plain wrong. Dealing with nuclear waste is simple and a solved problem.
You dig a deep hole, put the waste in protected caskets and backfill with clay, done.
As a Swede I am a huge proponent of Sweden/Finland/Norway building massive nuclear waste storage facilities and taking on the responsibility for taking care of the global nuclear waste, we have a stable bedrock, stable political systems, plenty of unused land and have experience building underground structures, a nuclear waste facility for global waste would also create jobs.
You claim that proponents of nuclear power just parrot influencers with no original thought or are invested in nuclear power.
The same could absolutely be said of the anti-nuclear supporters, you keep repeating the same old arguments with no original thought for your self, and what is worse is that plenty of the anti-nuclear propaganda is backed by oil/coal/gas companies.
I am not an idiot, I realize that the future of energy is with renewables, I have seen articles about how nations have had days where they are only using renewables to power themselves.
But I don’t believe we should be waiting to shut down fossil fuel plants until renewables are ready, I believe we need to design a drop in replacement for fossil fuel plants now, not tomorrow, not next year, not in a decade, now. And the only resonable way is nuclear power.
Nuclear power is not the power of the future, it is an interim solution as we transition to renewables, meaning we can stop using fossils much faster than else.
So, let’s imagine if the idiotic overreaction of the “Atomkraft, Nein danke” movement had failed, and we had built nuclear plants rather than coal, gas and oil, I absolutely believe we would have not seen as big of a rise in global temperatures in the last decades as we have seen, we would have better air and water, and it would just be better.
There are plenty of waste solutions. Most nuclear waste is actually short lived, either a few days or a few years. Most waste is not the long life stuff, the waste issue has been blown way out of proportion by groups that are simply against nuclear in general, not using facts based on reality.
In the UK for instance (readily available numbers):
94% – low-level waste (LLW)
~6% – intermediate-level waste (ILW)
<1% – high-level waste (HLW)
Numbers will be similar elsewhere for uranium based reactors.
The bigger issue that no one ever wants to talk about is how much other radioactive material is not accounted for from other power sources. People talk.about radiation from nuclear obviously, but what about the nuclear material ejected directly into the atmosphere from other power plants?
For instance, the amount of ash produced by coal power plants in the United States is estimated at 130,000,000 tons per year, and fly ash is estimated to release 100 times more radiation than an equivalent nuclear plant. Meanwhile, a 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant produces about 27 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel (unreprocessed) every year. And remember, it is the airborne radioactive elements causing most issues during incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima.
If a nuclear plant released the amount of radioactive material a coal plant does in just an hour it would be an international nuclear incident.
Imagine how much more efficient nuclear power would be if we didn’t let our nuclear nightmares take over and have us stop or severely restrict it…
Sorry but this is the most lunatic comment I’ve seen in a while. Why be careful with anything right? Let’s bring back lead, CFCs and all the stuff we have band because we were careful.
Fact is, Nucular is extremely expensive, hard to control, dangerous and still has no real waste solution. People pushing for it either just repeat influencers with no own original thought or hoping to make a dollar on the massive subsidies the governments will have to invest, if this becomes a reality.
This is a perfect immitation of the ridiculous things people say about nuclear power and have been since the 1960s.
IMO, any energy plan needs to have reduced consumption as priorities 1-10 and past that nuclear isn’t always worse than renewables.
Lead, CFCs, Asbestos and the like have all been banned for consumer use, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Being unhealthy doesn’t mean they have no application and can’t be carefully used.
At scale, neither do renewables. Solar panels are a sandwich of dozens of trace elements, heavy metals, plastic and everything else. Nitpicking nuclear here is silly because the amount of waste generated is the least by an order of magnitude. Keep waste generation under control and its management basically an afterthought.
These conversations always get bogged down in $/kW, which is not what we should be worried about. Nuclear has a lower lifetime carbon footprint than renewables, which is worth the extra spend in our current climate crisis. It’s an important tool for sustainable energy usage; you can’t use renewables as a drop in replacement for everything.
Do you have a source for that graph? I’m interested in the study, but couldn’t find it with a web search.
I believe it was this article. The main point was on how incredibly shitty coal is but I thought it was interesting how the others stacked up as well
Half the reason it ends up so expensive is because no one has experience building them, and so they always end up over budget when they do get made (at least in the US)
And the danger is vastly overblown. Far more have died as the results of accidents in other power industries then as a result of nuclear. It’s very safe when properly regulated (and not run by clowns aka Chernobyl)
Chernobyl was disastrous because design flaws were not relayed to the plant engineers. It took years of roadblocked research to find out what had happened. Even the man that had helped to design the RBMK reactor did not consider a meltdown was possible because the xenon that ended up poisoning the reactor would burn off under normal circumstances.
The meltdown could have been prevented if not for the soviet government inexplicably withholding critical information about the reactor from it’s own engineers.
Chernobyl also had known design defects the Soviets chose to ignore because they couldn’t admit their precious atomic program was even capable of having a flaw.
And even with those defects, it required a very specific and normally unlikely sequence of events and multiple warnings being ignored before the core melted down.
The are about 450 nuclear power plants in operation. The number of plants built did not come up in my searches, but let’s say it was double that.
There were three full and two partial meltdowns in nuclear power plants.
That leaves us with a 0.5% chance of a meltdown per reactor.
I know the calculation is extremely simplified, but the risk is still too high for me.
There are a lot of airliners flying around.
Back in the 60s airliners crashed far more frequently per passenger mile.
So clearly airliners would never go anywhere.
The problem is the financing, the plants are so expensive they try to wring infinitely money out of old designs, which makes new designs harder to build because the old designs need so much regulation to be safe.
We need to start rolling out 4th Gen reactors like an assembly line, reactors designed to fail safe with almost no risk of release events.
Compare the shitty PWR, or God forbid the RBMK design to a modern PBR, which, if power goes out just fizzles as the water moderator boils off.
The left is so absolutely religious about nuclear power (because of weapons BTW, a fair reason, but it’s being exploited), while the right hate it becausw they own all the fossil fuels.
Don’t forget the more than 200 nuclear powered ships currently puttering their way around the world, both above and below the surface. Not to mention the numerous research and testing reactors that don’t product grid energy.
And that doesn’t even get into things like RTGs used on spacecraft and in extremely remote regions where traditional fuels would be nearly impossible to transport reliably. Not technically a reactor in the traditional sense of what people think of as a reactor there, but nuclear energy all the same. The USSR built more than 1,500 of those alone while they were around.
And even ignoring all of those, alternative reactor designs like Thorium molten salt reactors can’t meltdown if cooling systems fail, because the fuel used doesn’t generate heat requiring constant cooling like that.
The only reason most designs we have in use now are uranium based is because that can be used to create weapons, so that’s where the research went… alternatives like Thorium can’t, despite the fuel being much more abundant.
That’s not how statistics work. Meltdowns are not random events.
Nuclear* FTFY
Yes, but our continued use of fossil fuels will be exponentially more expensive with regards to global warming.
No, it is very safe and well known, Chornobyl, TMI and Fukashima are the major accidents in nuclear power, TMI was caused by a badly designed and missunderstood control system, Chornobyl was caused by a bad reactor design combined with a culture of secrecy, Fukashima was caused by a natural disaster combined with a bad location.
We have learned from this and modern nuclear power plants are safe to the point of being boring.
This is just plain wrong. Dealing with nuclear waste is simple and a solved problem.
You dig a deep hole, put the waste in protected caskets and backfill with clay, done.
As a Swede I am a huge proponent of Sweden/Finland/Norway building massive nuclear waste storage facilities and taking on the responsibility for taking care of the global nuclear waste, we have a stable bedrock, stable political systems, plenty of unused land and have experience building underground structures, a nuclear waste facility for global waste would also create jobs.
You claim that proponents of nuclear power just parrot influencers with no original thought or are invested in nuclear power.
The same could absolutely be said of the anti-nuclear supporters, you keep repeating the same old arguments with no original thought for your self, and what is worse is that plenty of the anti-nuclear propaganda is backed by oil/coal/gas companies.
I am not an idiot, I realize that the future of energy is with renewables, I have seen articles about how nations have had days where they are only using renewables to power themselves.
But I don’t believe we should be waiting to shut down fossil fuel plants until renewables are ready, I believe we need to design a drop in replacement for fossil fuel plants now, not tomorrow, not next year, not in a decade, now. And the only resonable way is nuclear power.
Nuclear power is not the power of the future, it is an interim solution as we transition to renewables, meaning we can stop using fossils much faster than else.
So, let’s imagine if the idiotic overreaction of the “Atomkraft, Nein danke” movement had failed, and we had built nuclear plants rather than coal, gas and oil, I absolutely believe we would have not seen as big of a rise in global temperatures in the last decades as we have seen, we would have better air and water, and it would just be better.
It’ nucular ☝️
Ok so you are just trolling, got it.
There are plenty of waste solutions. Most nuclear waste is actually short lived, either a few days or a few years. Most waste is not the long life stuff, the waste issue has been blown way out of proportion by groups that are simply against nuclear in general, not using facts based on reality.
In the UK for instance (readily available numbers): 94% – low-level waste (LLW) ~6% – intermediate-level waste (ILW) <1% – high-level waste (HLW)
Numbers will be similar elsewhere for uranium based reactors.
The bigger issue that no one ever wants to talk about is how much other radioactive material is not accounted for from other power sources. People talk.about radiation from nuclear obviously, but what about the nuclear material ejected directly into the atmosphere from other power plants?
For instance, the amount of ash produced by coal power plants in the United States is estimated at 130,000,000 tons per year, and fly ash is estimated to release 100 times more radiation than an equivalent nuclear plant. Meanwhile, a 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant produces about 27 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel (unreprocessed) every year. And remember, it is the airborne radioactive elements causing most issues during incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima.
If a nuclear plant released the amount of radioactive material a coal plant does in just an hour it would be an international nuclear incident.