Pro unless you want to build one in a 15 mile proximity of my house then I get cold feet
All reactors are subject to overheat leading to meltdown when suddenly shutdown. They become massive energy vampires, requiring huge cooling power (and manpower) for up to 2 years after to avoid that.
What are the odds that a “social collapse” (war, plague, disaster, etc) leaves some with no workers and no external juice? Not if, when! Meltdowns will occur, some will breach containment. Only fools light an unextinguishable fire that kills them if they ever stop feeding it.
While reactor designs are “safe”: this requires that they follow protocols, which often means unplanned downtime. Given the social pressures for energy, it seems that reactor operators will sometimes disobey shutdown requirements. Corruption is real in all societies. With reactors it absolutely includes a non-zero catastrophe chance. Again not if, when!
Reactors are safe, for a pre-designed lifespan. Often 50 years. To decommission properly is massively expensive and takes years of labour, and requires a replacement plant. Are operators actually squirreling away the funds to have this all saved up 50 years later (by “overcharging” now)? Or are the future governments just gonna keep patching a pig… not if, when!
What kind of containment system will work for 10s of thousands of years? What does that cost, or even look like?
https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/
All this only holds true for traditional large scale commercial reactors.
Newer large scale reactors designs don’t require any power to cool once the reaction is shutdown (which is automatic if power is lost) and will not melt down if a loss of power happens.
Dedicated trust funds help pay for shutdown and yes, a new reactor would need to be built. This cost is significantly less than oil, gas, or coal over the long-term. Upfront cost with nuclear are higher, but only because of the large scale projects we currently utilize.
As far as containing nuclear waste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
Sounds like a burden? Let me ask you how they control the pollution from Gas, Oil, or Coal. Trick question, they don’t really control it at all except for some scrubbing. Please realize that 250,000 people die (low estimate) from pollution related to power generation every year.
So every year non-nuclear fossil based power generation is killing a quarter of a million people. I would like to hear how you logically deal with this in your argument against nuclear.
I’m nuclear neutral.
Nuclear is a great resource and we should try to keep all plants that are online today online.
However, expansion of nuclear in the corrupt, finance-capital USA should be deprioritized in favor of renewables and storage. The latter has insanely fast construction times and can be deployed much faster than new nuclear. We’re racing against the clock to transition our society away from carbon polluting activities, and renewables present the greatest opportunity to cut down the largest emitting section: fossil fuel power.
Long term I think humanity needs to invest in more fission and definitely fusion, but we’re in a climate crisis and need solutions now.
Pro, I think a lot of the anti-nuclear sentiments are leftovers from when nuclear power was not as heavily regulated as it is now.
Now it’s basically impossible for a meltdown except for if a literal natural disaster happens, and sometimes even then
And it’s a very clean energy source, with the one problem of what to do with the radioactive waste, but there is far less waste than fossil fuels, and it’s easier to get rid of.
I’m nominally pro, or maybe passively anti while cheaper, more scalable, and cleaner sources are at hand. If you’re already going full wind, solar, and geo and there’s still a rationale for a nuclear plant, I’m open to it. But that’s a big fat if.
The thing with nuclear power is that it’s FAR easier to convert a fossil fuel generator to nuclear than it is to convert it to green or to build a new one.
And yes, I agree, we need more green, but we first need to kill off all the fossil fuel options.
Although you are right in the sense that nuclear produces steam, I am not aware of any instance of this having been done. The steam turbine is such a small part of a nuclear plant.
In my view nuclear is best as a baseline production and heat production method. The baseline part may reduce as grid batteries smooth out the volatile production of the renewables.
Coal-to-Nuclear is actually pretty common, LINK
As a society, it’s easier to do everything at once rather than one thing at a time. Edit: The difference with nuclear is that it’s so much more expensive than other green options that spending on it now takes significant potential kwh out of the grid if it is given equal funding priority.
I’m a fan of nuclear technology. Any plants working today should be maintained indefinitely, and in places that don’t have any options due to geography building new ones today makes sense. And hopefully those investments can help make nuclear tech cheaper in the future with SMRs, etc.
That said, anywhere that is still burning fossil fuels on a nice sunny day should be investing all their energy money into building renewables. It’s such an amazingly cheap and quick way to replace fossil fuels. Each panel hooked up is instantly displacing fossil fuels being burnt. And once you have enough solar to cover the daylight hours, you’re going to be overproducing during the brightest hours and that will induce people to hook up batteries to profit from the “free” energy and now you’ve solved the duck curve hours.
I also have some reservations about humans being responsible enough. I live in Japan and do not trust that the energy companies have learned anything from Fukushima, they’re just doing as little as possible to cover their asses. The end of Pax Americana and the rise of Climate Change unrest will also increase terrorism risks. It’s not bad enough that I’m saying don’t build nuclear, but I feel it’s still enough of a risk that renewables should be preferred when possible (of course new tech mitigates this to some extent with safer spent fuels and smaller reactors). Just decentralizing the grid so that homes can generate their own power after storms is a huge win with renewables.
Pro. If you consider how absolutely minuscule the risks are (keep your regulatory bodies free of corruption, guys), all political criticism looks uninformed and performative, answers in this thread included.
Imagine an anti-vaxx hippie: presents as progressive, gushes of pointless contrarianism, easily exploitable by the estabilishment*. That’s how I see the nuclear power-“critics”, both here and elsewhere.
* E.g.: I consider the Green Party of Switzerland the epitome of counter-productive performative idiocy ever since they’ve been campaigning for replacing our NPPs with gas turbine plants. Fuckin’ 🤡s the lot of them.
Pro, but renewables do deploy way faster so we do want those renewables to be running while we wait for the nuclear plants to be constructed.
Turning off fossil fuel burning plants is the priority
I’m against nuclear because it’s too expensive and there is no proper place to store the depleted material.
There’s plenty of places?
And do remember, it’s taking what was already a dangerous material, processing it to be less dangerous, and then putting it somewhere safe
Unlike where we store all the CO2, plenty of room for that in our atmosphere.
I used to be anti-nuclear in the past but I realized a lot of the talking points were either wrong or directly favoring the fossil fuel companies. 100% for Nuclear and renewable energy.
Im pro nuclear power as long as it is cost effective.
Renewable solar and wind with backup batteries is by far the least expensive power supply at the moment.
Anything contradicting the previous sentence is a complete lie that was spread by liars with money to gain.
yes. its stable and powerful, you cant rely entitely on renewable energy because sun does not always shine, wind does not always blow and hydro-electric outputs too little power compared to the damage caused. you also cant rely on coal because youre going to fucking die
I am pro nuclear energy. It’s the most efficient way to generate sustainable electricity in abundance in the smallest amount of space.
We’re not running out of space. That’s a strange thing to use as a decider.
Same opinion here. It’s basically a gas well boiler plant without the CO2. The reason we don’t have more of it is due to politics surrounding transporting nuclear waste.
At this rate, I’m grateful for anything that isn’t burning fossil fuels.
I’d rather see solar and wind power though.
I think it works great in other places, but it is dangerous for America, where they will be built and maintained by bureaucratic Sociopathic corporations who will cut corners at every opportunity, until they fail, and kill millions.
Maybe someday America will evolve to the point where opportunities like this won’t be automatically hijacked by financial psychopaths.
where they will be built and maintained by bureaucratic Sociopathic corporations who will cut corners at every opportunity, until they fail, and kill millions.
That applies everywhere though regardless of profit incentive. Even the Soviet Union cut corners on the development and running of the Chernobyl plant which led to its infamous disaster. It’s not because of profiting mindset, but due to bureaucratic fear from an authoritarian leadership who want to speed up the process.
As someone who has done quite a bit of work on power systems (in the New Zealand context) recently.
You have to consider any energy generation technology in the environment it is going to be deployed in.
Whilst I am generally pro-nuclear; as a technology. It doesn’t really work as a deployable energy system in comparison to other forms of generation; especially here in NZ. There are three main reasons for this:
- Cost in both time and money to construct nuclear is far too high.
- Industry to support nuclear doesn’t exist in NZ. Expert techs, operators, fabricators etc are not here; we would need to build an industry alongside building the first plant.
- Regulatory framework to enable nuclear generation is almost nonexistent. We have medical isotope framework; as a basic way to work with radiological material.
- Bonus challenge; we would have to import all the fuel.
Countries with existing nuclear industries and power plant have a much easier time; but when comparing the cost in time and money to get the first GWh out of a nuclear generator; it is a hard sell.
One major advantage nuclear has over other forms of generation is physical footprint; effective power density is absolutely massive. To get similar power density in renewable generation, the only thing close would be the in development supercritical geothermal power; though nuclear would still have higher power density and is not geographically constrained.
Maybe things will change in the future. Maybe small modular reactors will eventuate in an easy to deploy way; or the developments in Chinese thorium reactors will pan out to a viable generation tech. But technology is not the only stumbling block that nuclear energy faces; especially in a small country that doesn’t have an existing nuclear industry.
I know there is a lot of money being thrown at fusion; and that may change the game entirely, it is an interesting time to be looking at energy systems.
NZ is earthquake and volcano prone, not ideal for nuclear.
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