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.
It’s less efficient compared to more decentralized renewable energy; it’s ok to keep the working centrals but I’m against new ones.
This is the key point. One supports or supposed policies. But “nuclear” is not one; it’s a power source, not a policy. So then the serious discussions are what new power plants to build, and when to retire current nuclear plants… And those are both worthwhile topics with totally different considerations and answers.
It also depends where you live, because the alternatives are geographically dependent. Are you in South Dakota? Might wanna do solar or wind.
It also depends what scale you mean. A slightly wealthy homeowner in the US can afford their rooftop solar, but many people can’t afford it or can’t install it. And this matters, right? If the power companies are fucking us over, using less of their juice is a good idea, but only of we can… And this all ties into the relative benefits of nuclear.
Better than burning fossil fuels, which we should have stopped fifty years ago. That’s the debate, not whether we should be using renewables as much as possible.
Anti, pro arguments only work in comparison to coal which is a low bar. We frankly simply have not solved the waste issue. I study chemistry and yes, the amounts are tiny, but some isotopes in waste have half lives longer than any structure we can build would last and scaling up nuclear would scale up this problem before it’s solved (just like we did with greenhouse gases). Also it’s objectively more expensive than any renewable source, as multiple independent studies have found.
Context: I’m currently doing a PhD in nuclear engineering
Hard-line advocates of nuclear power usually point to its role as a ‘baseload’ generation, but this term is often misused. A lot of people use it as if it means “reliable power on demand” as opposed to wind and solar which is not (without batteries). But baseload generation generally refers to plants with unvarying output that provide the minimum energy consumption of the grid, so that other (varying output) energy sources can be turned up or down to make up the deficit.
The “unvarying” part is very important for nuclear power. Conventional nuclear plants (PWRs and LWRs) really hate when you vary their power output. This is because varying heat and radiation flux through the fuel rod cladding causes a “racheting” effect which accelerates the swelling of fuel pellets against them leading to formation of cracks in the surface oxide, which can propagate into the bulk metal if power goes up and down too often, leading to rupture of the fuel rod cladding (which is bad). Anything below 85% power output for longer than 2 weeks is classed as extended reduced power operation (ERPO) and should be minimised - typically it is done for maintenance purposes.
This is important because it influences how much of your energy production can actually come from nuclear. France for example generates something like 75% of its electrical power from nuclear, but this is only possible because they are surrounded by countries which import a lot of energy (i.e. Germany and the UK), so they can offload excess power there and avoid putting their plants into ERPO. If Germany and the UK had similarly high amounts of nuclear, the system would not work and a lot of plants would experience reliability issues.
All this is to say, nuclear is an excellent energy source for making up a large, unvarying chunk of energy production (say, ~30-40%) but anything much more than that can cause more problems than it solves. One power source which can provide reliable on-demand time-varying energy is… batteries! Which is one of the reasons that recent advances in battery + solar are so exciting to me. A power grid made up of solely nuclear and renewables working together to meet time-varing demand is now completely plausible. So we dont have to choose between nuclear or renewables per se, we just have to deploy each in a way that suits its own merits.
What about nuclear + storage (pumped hydro, batteries) then? That should let you up the baseload a bit right.
Might I just add that nuclear isn’t exactly dealing with climate change and water shortages that well.
It’s something I never really thought about, but plenty of nuclear plants have faced climate related issues in recent years, and been forced to shutdown or reduce output.
Also, in an age of drone warfare, decentralised power production is potentially also a huge plus.
This is true. We hear about it happening a lot in mainland europe because there are a lot of inland reactors relying on rivers/reservoirs, however coastal reactors aren’t vulnerable in the same way. Climate change certainly isn’t making nuclear obsolete, but it definitely changes the way we need to think about cooling systems
Of course, coastal reactors are vulnerable in other ways. Climate change can exacerbate extreme weather events. It’s the annoying thing about lots of stuff, you only really find out what goes wrong, when it goes wrong.
Unknown unknowns, as some arsehole once put it.
Also, coal contains small amounts of uranium and thorium which gets concentrated in the fly ash. Fly ash which then gets spread across the area surrounding the power plants. So I’m certainly not saying nuclear is obsolete or particularly dangerous compared to alternatives like coal.
Removed by mod
and will continue to be the future, forever
Removed by mod
my issue with fission is that it is one of those ideas that are a perfect way to delay reasonable solutions (solar, wind and batteries) because some magical solution is arriving any second now.
we do not need fission. we need political will
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/
Pro unless you want to build one in a 15 mile proximity of my house then I get cold feet
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.
The security problem ruins the amazing tech. In an age of terrorism and drones, the risk isn’t acceptable. The same goes for hydro unfortunately, which is my fav energy form (I like watermills).
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
Currently in reality? Under capitalism, genocide, planetary annihilation, etc? I’m opposed. It will absolutely be used as a tool of violence and exploitation like every other “technology” developed under capitalism.
In an imaginary world… It depends on the imaginary situation, etc. But that’s largely irrelevant to actual reality.
I am pro nuclear energy. It’s the most efficient way to generate sustainable electricity in abundance in the smallest amount of space.
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.
We’re not running out of space. That’s a strange thing to use as a decider.
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.
Nation states will choose uranium / plutonium reactors so that they can abuse nuclear power for weapons grade material generation. But we already have nuclear proliferation. Cat’s out of the bag. Given that nuclear is a huge win in almost every other way, I’m pro-nuclear even in the context of nation states.
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