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 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.
I think wind/solar first priority. Nuclear wherever it makes sense. I may trust Canadians to run them properly and in places not prone to natural disasters like Earthquakes and Tsunamis, but we live on a planet full of assholes. Downside is potential invaders bombing nuclear power plants in the future.
It would have to be a pretty big bomb. After 9/11 they did a bunch of research and it turns out a reactor building can take a hit from a 747.
Renewables are absolutely the future, but people really don’t get how the nuclear industry handles safety. If we could regulate every industry as well as the nuclear industry has been since 1980 (which the current administration is trying to strip away, of course) we would eliminate a heckuva lotta risk in our society.
Most things have already been said, but here my personal list:
- No way to get properly rid of waste jet
- Quite unreliable (AFAIK one of the French ones only operated half the time it should in 2024)
- Recourses for it are generally supplied by oppositional nations
- If they blow up it’s bad, even if they don’t by themselves they might through third party influence
- Generally positioned by politicians as an excuse to not build renewables, not replace fossil fuels
- They are a entry point for building nukes, their existence making anti nuke treaties hard to control
Most importantly: they don’t make financial sense. Renewables provide the cheapest energy and even the required energy storages can compete on the market. The French Court of Auditors published a statement after one of the more recent power plants were openened that basically just: stop building fucking nuclear power plants they cost way to much
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.
It would have been great if there was not the questions of;
- costs: to operate and to build one.
- safety (unfortunately, the times are less and less safe and having a big target that can devastate a huge are isn’t ideal).
- there is no real plan for what to do with the nuclear waste. => shipping everything to and old salt mine is no longer viable.
- yes it’s C02 neutral, but the impact on the enviroment to enrige the materials and later cool the radiactive material is also considerable.
- are there even enough people that can operate one?
- you still have realiance on others for the radiactive materials.
- Just like other renewable energies the nuclear power plants are often not operating and out of the grid. (During this haat wave for example to river water was too hot to be used as coolant and the nclear powet plants had to be put of the grid.
For all this I think it’s a waste of resources to invest on an old technology thats sounds cool but has been proven to have many major drawbacks, compared to what it has to offer. So I’m all for using these resources in renewable energy sources, how to be more efficient with them, how to improve the accumulation capacities and how to have grids that are cimpatible with them.
Every country that’s able should have some nuclear power if for no other reason than creating radioisotopes used for medicine.
It takes billions and almost a decade to spin up a reactor. Current reactors are a generational risk. One bomb at Diablo Canyon and an area the size of New Jersey becomes uninhabitable for 1000 years.
Had Fukushima gone slightly differently you would have lost Tokyo and the 125 mile stretch of the island nation would be uninhabitable for a generation.
That’s not even considering the spent fuel concerns…
Meanwhile you could build plenty of solar and wind gen with none of the risk.
It’s great and we should have more of it.
Unjustified fears of it blowing up and destroying the world are ridiculous and overblown, especially given modern advances in reactor design and safety.
There are 431 reactors, and 360 of them are based on 1960s technology, designed and built mostly in the 1970s. They are 50+ years old. Thanks to Chernobyl, reactors are basically stuck in time.
There are only 4 Gen 3 reactors in service, and 2 gen 4. Why we don’t have 200+ gen 3/4 reactors is… insane. We just keep re-fueling the less safe Gen 2 reactors.
But this is generally just a problem with all our infrastructure in the developed world in general… we don’t renew or upgrade it… we just keep patching it and then we wonder why everything is so shitty and inefficient…
How is the waste not an issue? I have never heard the argument of it being stolen to be honest. Here in germany the problem with the waste is, that there is no good place to put it (though this is partly a political problem)
eh, i’m 50% talking out of my ass here, but the waste is actually not a problem. if we wanted to, we could use it again to extract even more energy out of it … problem is that that’s currently not economical.
“using it again” would require special reactor designs that can stimulate the material to do extra-decay. which causes the extra cost.
That is more like 99% out of your ass.
in the USA they won’t re-process fuel because of fears it will be stolen and turned into weapons. so we have 5x the waste volume than other countries where fuel is re-processed.
also we won’t use breeder reactors because of this, which are more efficient and produce way less waste than normal reactors.
yes, it’s all political problems. people are ignorant and angry and fearful and won’t let nuclear power problems be resolved because they don’t understand solutions exist and if you try to educate them they refuse to learn because they want to cling to their fears and emotions about it.
Because the amount of waste we’ve created is really quite small. Per the US DoE:
U.S. commercial reactors have generated about 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel since the 1950s. If all of it were able to be stacked together, it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards (or meters).
There are ways we can repurpose or reuse spent nuclear fuel. I don’t know a lot about this so I won’t get into it, but even if we chose to do nothing with it and just bury it, we know enough about geology that we could stick it into some bedrock that will be stable for the next 500 million years.
But long term storage also isn’t easy. Maybe it’s less of a problem in the US (you’ve got a lot more free space where no one lives) but it has to be made sure that it does not contaminate the surroundings, even in thousands of years and more. Another (as of yet unsolved) problem is far more human. How do we mark those places, if at all. See this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
Just hollow out a mountain, like the US did with Yucca mountain, plenty of storage (if you’re politicians let it be used for its purpose) that is pretty easy to secure for centuries (and after that probably pretty easy as well). Assuming you close it up well when full, even future historians probably will have an idea that it’s dangerous by the level of security to just get into it.
Not trying to discount the issue, just point out that there generally are solutions to the issues around nuclear waste, just that politicians have mucked it up quite a bit in the past (especially in the US).
Just hollow out a mountain, like the US did with Yucca mountain
Until Harry Reid does everything in his power to shut it down like an asshole
The idea in germany are old mines, we already have some “temporary” solution (an old saltmine) but there are some problems with it. Understandably there is a lot of nimbyism around the permanent storage, which makes finding a good spot a lot harder
Only ~3% of nuclear waste is really dangerous, that’s the spent fuel rods. The majority of “nuclear waste” is stuff that was in proximity and contains intermediate to low levels of radioactivity. It’s obviously not great to injest or spend all your time around, but it can be safely stored almost anywhere as it’s mostly only emitting alpha and beta particles.
So what about the dangerous stuff like fuel rods? Well, if you took all the dangerous waste nuclear power ever created and piled it in one place, it would cover a football field and be stacked 3 meters high. That sounds like a lot, but remember, that’s is ALL the dangerous waste nuclear power has EVER produced. Compare that to literally any other form of energy production, including solar and wind, and the footprint from nuclear is laughably, almost unimaginably, small.
I think you have no clue how dangerous that waste is. There is literally no way to store it in a volume like you described because of all the heat it generates. If it gets distributed for some reason, it could contaminate the entire planet.
Also, other nuclear waste is not not dangerous. You have to store it in a way that it doesn’t pollute water, for example. That is a much harder problem than you might think. Here is an interesting read for you:
It takes 10 years minimum from design to build out for a nuclear project, so that lines up pretty well with the end of the cold war once the US didn’t need more nuclear material.
There is no point in using a technology that is only as profitable as it is due to subsidies and that generates tons of dangerous waste that we have no proper storage strategy for, when we could just use regenerative energy sources with basically no side effects and build a much more resilient power grid in the process.
Which has never happened
which, as we all know, implies that it will never happen …
actually, after reading through your whole comment, it has a few issues:
Unjustified fears of it blowing up and destroying the world are ridiculous and overblown, especially given modern advances in reactor design and safety.
Yes, you’re right, nuclear power plants are safe as long as nobody in engineering royally fucks up. But, as we all know, engineers never fuck up and forget an important detail … (/s)
But this is generally just a problem with all our infrastructure in the developed world in general… we don’t renew or upgrade it… we just keep patching it and then we wonder why everything is so shitty and inefficient… because we refuse to actually upgrade things in a real way
This sounds like a popular thing to me … people think that replacing old things will make them better / more efficient. When that is simply not true. Banks, for example, still use programming language from the 1960s. Why? because actually it turns out that that stuff just works. Meanwhile newer languages each introduce their own new kind of problem. The same phenomenon happens in many cases. I was told that airplanes do the same, using flight control software from 20th century … for the same reasons. “newer” does not imply better.
nuclear power is fine but extremely dangerous in the hands of the wrong person, not because nuclear power plants itself are dangerous but because we’re 1 step away from someone making 1 bad joke about how we should use it in “other ways” and that would escalate international conflicts rapidly. and i do not trust the government to be stable enough to not eventually fall into the wrong hands. therefore, no. at least not in the foreseeable future.
We have some aging reactors from the 1980s.
Generally favourable views. It was a mistake to stop building them.
If you find the cooling water you can build one in my back yard if you like if the town I live in gets a few cents per kWh you produce.
I’m nuclear industry adjacent, and I work in public safety. My thoughts, which are only my own:
- Renewables are the future. Nuclear power is expensive and takes a long time to build, mostly because people don’t like the idea of a reactor near them. While that’s also true of things like wind farms, the lawsuits on those don’t take as long, I guess.
- Small modular reactors may have a place in our future energy landscape, but the specifics remain to be seen. SMRs are (obviously) smaller, so they have less fuel in them, generate less waste, and would be easier to build (like modular homes, they’d be all made basically the same in a factory and shipped to their site). They are in a race against good enough battery technology to carry the base load. Who will win? Well, nuclear is getting a lot of extra support currently, but still, who knows?
- Nuclear power is so much safer than people assume. Nuclear reactors have reactor buildings which are big thick concrete monstrosities (part of the reason they’re so dang expensive to build). It’s quite hard for them to leak, so releases will end up being little amounts out of limited area. Yes, even Fukushima, which while very bad and very expensive to clean up, wasn’t the thing killing people. One person officially died, years later from lung cancer. Cancer he might have gotten anyway; we can’t know. In the US at least, a lot of money goes into emergency preparation at nuclear power plants, trying to mitigate the impacts of any kind of event, but the concern is cancer, not radiation poisoning. 3.5 interestingly, SMRs will probably not get big thick concrete structures around them, or at least not as big or as thick. It’s because the risk is lower in those designs but also because there’s just not as much material that could be flung around. This may have changed though (this is not my specific area, just something I hear a lot about). Maybe it will be more akin to naval reactors or something. Those are very small, and very very safe.
- Nuclear waste storage is a political problem. The nuclear industry has been paying for a long-term storage solution for decades and recently sued the US government over it. We absolutely built a house without a toilet, but we could change that with enough political will. Until then, the waste sits at the plant under guard. It’s not great but none of the plants are going to run out of room or anything.
- The US government is going away from certain standards that are generally recognized as being the safest approach to radiological exposure. This, quite frankly, may be disastrous, but likely not immediately. Eventually I could see it leading to eroded safety culture and that could be a problem long term. But I’m a notorious pessimist, so…
- Renewables are the future. Anyone telling you anything different is selling something. Probably stock in an SMR company.
As an industry adjacent person, I’m curious to know your thoughts on the potential for nuclear fuel reprocessing. Is it at all feasible to start up again or is it a pipe dream?
This isn’t my exact area, but my understanding is that this is also a political will thing. There are concerns about reprocessing because some of the reprocessing could make bombs and we’re scared of it getting stolen? I think? Idk, not my area. But as I understand it, other places in the world already do reprocessing. I’m not sure we will ever get there. We can’t even get a storage facility!
The eroded safety culture is a big worry of mine. COVID did some wiiild shit to the healthcare industry.
This is absolutely my main concern too (and the specific area in which I work, so the thing I feel lost comfortable commenting on). I don’t think it’s going to be an overnight shift or anything. What I think will happen is that the US will step away from standard international practices when it comes to how much radiation a person can receive (and therefore how much the general public can receive) and while nothing will change right away, eventually nuclear plants will cut costs somewhere and not filter out as much material as they have been required to up til now. Any increases in cancer 20-30 years from now will probably get blamed on something else though, knowing how our system works. For nuclear workers, the effects will probably be more noticable and quicker, but again, attempts will be made to hide any negative health consequences. Lord forbid we have a release incident during that time though. And even worse if regulations relax to the point where the utility doesn’t have to carry the burden of fixing the problem they created (which is where I see things going over the long term). Right now, if a plant releases radioactive material they are legal responsible for that material. If that eroded what incentive will they have to make sure they don’t lose it?
I’m struggling to believe your nuclear industry adjacent if you think that the energy density of any type of battery system known to man starts to compare to the energy density of thorium let alone u-232
It’s not about energy density. It’s about base load issues. One of the big items that the nuclear industry harps on is that they handle base load energy requirements when wind and solar aren’t producing as much. But a good battery system would also solve that problem, by allowing excess wind and solar energy to be stored for use when the base load is high but wind and solar aren’t able to produce that amount of energy at that exact time.
It literally is about energy density. You don’t understand how many batteries you would need to replace one mid sized nuclear plant. Batteries are not 100% efficient closer to 70% after charge and discharge. A mid sized plant is 500-700MW. A 1 MW battery is a 20-foot shipping container. It weighs about 15 tons and you would need about 1000 to replace the plant and enough renewables to recharge all of those 1000 batteries to get the 700MW back out to note, this would be 1,360,000 cubed feet of batteries, not counting housing, cooling systems, sprinkler systems, or anything else. This doesn’t even get into the fact the battery bank isn’t producing live load and is only good for 1 to 3 hours of draw till the cells are drained (1 to 3MWH ). While the plant produces round the clock energy. So quadroople your batteries minimum.
I guess the point is that they’re working on better batteries, right? Ones that can get better efficiencies and all that? I am not an expert in this area of course, but I’m also not able to build you an SMR, so again, idk what technology will eventually win out (in terms of cost effectiveness or overall viability) I just know it’s something everyone’s talking about.
Are you the current president of the United States? Because I’ve just explained to you the exact flaw with this system in detail. And you have glossed over this with a platitude that everybody’s talking about it while providing no insight or understanding of the problem at hand, while also admitting you do not understand the fundamentals.
Lots of people talk about world peace. Turns out world peace is hard.
I assume you are talking about fission. We (Germany) somewhat famously don’t have nuclear power anymore and I think that is a good thing. IMO the risks overweigh the benefits, and I don’t only mean the risk of a nuclear power plant blowing up. Aside from that there are two mayor downsides.
First they are fucking expensive to build at least any recent projects I have heard of are billions over cost.
Second is the waste problem which specifically is a hot topic in germany, there just doesn’t seem to be a good way to get rid of it. I have read some comments saying that there are ways to deplete them even more but never heard of such a system being actually used.
A minor point for me is also that I think, that less centralised infrastructure using wind and solar energy is a better way to go.
Some proponents (especially online) love to talk about “small” reactors, but I’ve never heard of one actually being in use, at most there were tests of it is actually feasible (as far as I know at least, and I am not an expert)
Yea it was so clever of you guys to ditch nuclear in favor of… gas and coal? Great job protecting the environment there. Definitely not a dumbass decision made due to fear mongering.
No we didn’t. At least in all charts I could find (here for example) the usage of coal and gas did not change in the worst case and went down in the last few years because renewables increased
This graph is so painful to look at, if Germany kept a baseline of nuclear, you could have completely phase out coal entirely by now.
Or if the conservatives didn’t kill our solar industry in the eraly 2010s we could have had a lot more renewables
How does Germany handle the green house gas waste produced by coal power plants?
See that big space up there with the clouds? Let’s just put it there.
I wonder how many of those that died in France during this heat wave think about that idea.
Badly and those aren’t even the only problem with coal power just skim through this article about the Hambscher Forst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_Forest I am not saying that nuclear is the worst way to generate power, but if germany would have wanted to continue using it, the time would have been 20-30 years ago. The last exosting plants, which were shut down a few years ago, weren’t up to the task anymore, especially when looming at the problem france’s reactors have with the heat every year
Risky, better than fossil fuels in many ways, awesome scientific and industrial achievement
