I’d love to see more nuclear power generation. Nuclear power is the densest form of power on earth, it’s safer than even renewables and doesn’t have the huge e-waste or energy storage problems that come with it. It’s very, very safe even compared to windmills depending on where you draw the box. I have never met anybody who actually understands nuclear power safety or waste disposal who is against it. At best, they say “renewables are currently cheaper so let’s focus there” but they’re not like “Nuclear is bad”.
I’m usually against Sanders on this, but I very much respect the risky part of that sentence. Because I just don’t have a lot of faith in the future right now, and I don’t know if I trust any nuclear options going forward. I mean after Trump wins the election and implements his project f, or whatever it was called, who’s going to be the head of the nuclear regulatory agency? One of his shitty kids friends? Maybe Sanders is right and it’s a bad time.
Would you be surprised that we have dozens of nuclear plants all over the United States? Modern reactors that can withstand the mistakes of the past without the disaster? Media makes the public think the risk is higher than it is when in reality, more people have died per year installing renewables than all the nuclear disasters combined (per GW/H).
Right now the volume of waste is low enough that they store it on-site. Coal ash disposal is far more of a problem, and has led to major contamination incidents.
What figures do you have on decomissioning? How much does a coal or natural gas plant or oil refinery cost to decommission? Do plants need to be decommissioned or can they be incrementally upgraded?
Have you done any background on this or are you sealioning?
Edit: Oh. 17 of the earliest plants starting from the 50s. This has nothing to do with the construction and maintenance of modern nuclear power infrastructure.
Solar and wind are cheaper, but are variable, and have geographic limitations or high land use (45,000 acres of solar to equal the output of a modern nuclear plant). There is a place for nuclear, along with other carbon-free generation sources.
I wish it was more widely known by the average person that coal ash is radioactive and contains heavy metals like lead and arsenic due to concentration of elements that were found in trace amounts in the coal and remain once the coal is burnt. It’s horrible how poorly coal ash was handled (or purposefully used in construction) in the past and how contamination events still happen with little meaningful consequence to energy companies.
In the ground, very deep, forever, for not nearly as much money as you might think. It takes up very, very little space. It’s not green liquid, it’s pieces of glass.
This is the one side of the aisle I think Bernie is always on the wrong side of. Nuclear power of some form will be required for a full transition away from fossil sources, and it should be telling how fast other nations like China are dumping money into it. It is cleaner and causes fewer accidents per GWh than any fossil source ever has- it’s just been demonized for decades by those who stand to benefit from it being restricted and painted as a “non-green” energy source.
It should be said that most of our accidents don’t result in Chernobyl like death tolls, but then, Chernobyl is in a class all its own.
As bad as TMI was, and it’s the first one that came to my mind, it didn’t have any direct deaths. It was ridiculously close to having a massive death toll, and it cost like 2 billion to clean up over… decades…?
Pretty sure people kill more people than any other cause combined.
Could be wrong. Depends if you count manufactured famine and healthcare crises as part of that.
We should get off fossil fuels, but I don’t see nuclear as a way of doing that. Solar, wind, and hydro (tidal is interesting. Micro hydro could have uses without destroying entire ecosystems.)
.you just can’t get around needing consistent base load capacity. I wonder if the cost of a few GWh of batteries or complicated pumped dam/lake systems is reported in solar/wind figures to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
maybe once we have a huge fleet of plugged in EV‘s serving as battery storage, variable sources will make sense as primary generation
I’ll be the one to point out that TMI is exactly what you want to happen in a “nuclear disaster”. Nobody got seriously hurt that we know of, the problem was found and dealt with quickly once identified, and we’ve implemented TONS of extra safeties to make sure that can’t happen again without massive alarms and Serious Lights. Could it have not happened at all? Absolutely. But in a disaster, it’s the perfect “disaster” - nobody died, nobody got seriously injured directly, the plant got screwed up, and $2b to clean up ANY disaster site is honestly pretty damn cheap when we’re talking radioactive heavy metal remediation.
Radioactive materials (particularly gases,) were released so, it’s not quite perfect, but yes. TMI was much, much to be preferred over other possible outcomes of the accident.
all reactors are built near water and susceptible to some sort of flooding though. i realized that after German Biblis was hit by a flood earlier this month
So is nearly every coal/gas thermal power plant ever built. Steam turbines need water and cooling, thr type of thermal generation used doesn’t change that.
the point is: other types of power plants just spill less hazardous materials when destroyed by a flood and don’t have the additional risk of a meltdown.
It’s the most expensive if you don’t already have the infrastructure & experience needed to support it. Of course in places where nuclear is barely used or not used at all, it’s going to be more expensive than others. But the US doesn’t have such a problem – in large part due to lifetime extensions (which allow plants to operate for another 20-40 years, up to a maximum of 80 years), which bring nuclear’s cost down to comparable to renewables. Without lifetime extensions though, nuclear indeed would be more expensive than renewable energy.
Renewable energy also gets subsidized significantly more than any other form of energy – in the US, solar and wind both get roughly about 16x the $/MWh of nuclear, and 2x the total amount of budget. The EU also puts like half of its total energy subsidies into renewables (and a third into fossil fuels) and almost none in to nuclear. That should probably be taken into account too.
It is not the most expensive for any intrinsic reason. It’s not necessarily that complex to operate. It’s expensive because bureaucracy that has been strapped to it to make switching to it harder, which was designed to keep dirty energy in demand longer. It is the safest power source we have available (including renewables). There’s no reason it’s so expensive except to attempt to kill it.
i’m not sure what you’re talking about… The nuclear energy industry has a track record of safety and extensively regulated engineering that surpasses virtually any other industry
Fukashima happened because they skimped on the wall height and generator placement.
Enerhodar is currently under siege in Ukraine, future unknown
Those are two within the last 15 years. I’m glad when things are happy happy joy joy nuke plants are safe, but don’t think for a second that it’s a steady state. Ready to see what happens when a spent fuel pool gets hit with a bunker buster?
Solar power, as great as it is, is only available during the day and wind is also not a constant source of electricity either. Solar panels are also made through slave labor in China. The cobalt needed for a lot of our batteries to store renewables also comes from slave labor, though we’re working on that part. And almost all of the renewable sources don’t have parts recycled and instead put their heavy metals into landfills.
They’re still a lot better than fossil fuels but they’re by no means perfect. That’s why we need at least some nuclear to help with those issues
producing enough energy consistently is the key figure of merit for electric generation infrastructure. Not a hand wavy optional nice to have fru fru thing.
Nuclear disasters are becoming incredibly rare and plus a nation like the US for instance has plenty of wide open and otherwise unused land. Ask the military. So even if there were a disaster, they could be pushed far away from cities.
The only disaster in recent memory required a tsunami to cause it and its effects are very minimal. Mostly it just cost a lot to clean up which again, is miles better than the radiation from coal and spills of oil and release of natural gas. The standard for which nuclear must meet is way higher than any other energy source when it comes to contamination.
I also didn’t say that mining of other types didn’t matter. Coal has always abused its workers. Oil is bought from nations with large human rights abuses procuring it. Meanwhile Uranium is often easily accessible to nations and doesn’t even need to be traded for.
Using nuclear energy is such a brain dead easy decision. Only barriers are upfront costs and public perception.
While I am inclined to agree: those upfront costs translate directly into time. Time that we don’t necessarily have. Solar and wind are deployable and much less complex of a facility to run overall. For me it isn’t about the best energy producer as it is whichever method gets us of fossil fuels the fastest.
Nuclear has long term capabilities and should be used, don’t get me wrong, but solar and wind are bridges, if you will, to when it can have all the time and money it needs.
Yes but that doesn’t have much to do with what I was speaking on. In the short term, we should be heavily investing in solar and wind but we shouldn’t have an anti-nuclear stance.
So when people come along with an educated view of nuclear energy and talk about disasters and what not, I’m just making sure they know that’s not the sticking point. Nuclear isn’t dangerous, it’s just expensive and takes time to build.
Nuclear needs to be invested in for the long term, that’s the clarification. Until then, it’s wind and solar all the way. However, I’m concerned that we could end up in a future where wind and solar rely on these massive batteries which aren’t much better for everyone involved unless we recycle.
I’m not a nuclear absolutist, it’s just uneducated to say that nuclear is bad and shouldn’t be supported. It has applications, just later in our future
So, Fukushima was a story of incompetence and bribery, not under-engineering. It was perfectly safe when built. In the 30 years after that, the owners bribed investigators again and again to cover up deficiencies that were known.
I’m not sure what the nuclear plant being occupied by Russians who forced the entire safety team out at gunpoint has to do with the plant not being safe. The team was willing, by their own words, to keep working even with the Russians occupying the plant, even just keeping a minimum skeleton crew there to safely shut down the plant if necessary. That was shot down, almost literally - and Ukraine has been VERY careful about shelling that plant for political and infrastructure reasons even though enemy combatants are using it as a shelter to launch their own artillery strikes from.
sure, and you think this isn’t also happening in every single other industry right now?
That’s a regulatory problem and not a fundamental mechanics problem. the logic of “well it’s good but humans will cut corners” means we should never do anything at all.
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