You’re getting downvoted, but there’s some truth in it. You don’t just build a dam, you flood thousands of square miles and destroy hundreds of microcosms. Species have gone extinct due to dams. Not to mention that you can literally never remove them, because stupid humans build cities at their feet.
Ive come to find on reddit and lemmu that people don’t actually understand anything about nuclear energy, citing how bad Chernobyl is yet ignoring that not only is there still life in the exclusion zone, new species have emerged and been identified, where as successful dams that didn’t have any failures irrevocably damage and destroyed ecosystem upstream and downstream.
Not to mention that in the hundred years of nuclear plants, 30 people have died in TOTAL. Coal mines have killed a hundred thousand in the US alone, and windmills kill a few thousand in the UK alone each year. Nuclear has only killed 30 people. In a hundred years. Fukishima didn’t hurt a single person.
Nuclear produces the least emissions over it’s life cycle and has a safety rating that flip flops with solar depending on how they want to classify accidents in construction and preparation.
If you want a sustainable, clean and reliable future, your power grid needs Wind, Solar and Nuclear. There is absolutely no reason to exclude Nuclear Power from any green energy plan.
I hear a lot of people trash talking OWID but never see anyone disputing the data or otherwise proving it’s wrong. And the information it presents on a whole lines up with other information provided by other research, surveys and data points.
Do you want to argue, that the construction of a nuclear power plant causes significantly less ecological stress and pollution than solar panels and windturbines?
Think about if you really want to claim that as a thing you actually believe in.
I’m just gonna throw some words in a pool.
concrete, steel, space, deforestation, river, 10+ Years construction time, heavy machinery, dust, natural habitats, fuel, mining, waste, noise, cost, france…
Thank you. i rest my case.
It’s always windy. We live on a spinning planet.
Solar needs sun. Nuclear needs water to cool. Hydro needs water.
If you combine solar and wind you can replace many nuclear plants by just using the space we are already using.
There are a lot of good arguments for wind, and I’m not arguing against it, but density and consistency are well known issues. You absolutely cannot replace a nuclear plant with a wind farm of the same size and get the same output. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, wind farms can often coexist with other land uses, but that’s still a disruptive environment.
It’s good to put pressure on nuclear, the reason it’s so incredibly safe is because it’s highly regulated, but to completely ignore it is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The question isn’t “are nuclear plants perfectly safe”, the question is “will adding nuclear plants to our energy portfolio reduce the risks from climate change enough to offset the risks they introduce.”
I think, in that framework, replacing existing coal power plants with modern nuclear reactors is a huge overall benefit.
Wind and solar are great but there’s still a lot of work needed on storage and transmission before they can be viable grid scale. Realistically, saying no to nuclear doesn’t mean more wind, it means more natural gas. And those LNG tankers really are floating bombs.
Aren’t you forgetting something?
Liquidators also died way after the explosion from having to clean up all the rubble.
You can still not live in the area and will probably not be able to in many lifetimes.
More people have died working in Wind than Nuclear. And Nuclear has lower carbon emissions than Wind Turbines to boot.
I’m not arguing we shouldn’t be using Wind Turbines, we absolutely should, but the best, cleanest energy grid human kind can hope for right now is a combination of Solar, Wind and Nuclear, because each of three has very distinct advantages and disadvantages that complement each other while doing the least ecological and environmental damage compared to other alternatives.
Building dams literally kills whole ecosystems. Reduce biodiversity and razes woodland. They also do tend to take 10+ year of construction, just like nuclear power, while taking several times more materials. Your point is really stupid, nuclear power plants do not cause any more ecological stress than a moderate building in any city. They do consume vasts amounts of water, which can be an ecological issue, but not to the level that a dam creates. Wind turbines, for example, are not recyclable (materials used are too complex and use a lot of plastic) and they disrupt birds population. Just like solar panels, they have a very very short lifespan. Windturbines must be replaced every 5 years or so. So does solar panels but for different reasons. A nuclear power plant can create power for several decades if well maintained.
The thing is, no human intervention in any place is sustainable. Our mere mode of existence is so energy intensive that we are going to destroy the planet’s habitability no matter what we do. The time to change to 100% nuclear was 5 decades ago. The time to stop using fossil fuels was 4 decades ago. The time to change to sustainable energy was 3 decades ago. We lost the train. The planet won’t support us in any form in the long run. Hell, mammals might also be fucked within the next million years. The planet will never ever be the same it was during the past 2 million years. And it’s because of us.
The actual construction takes about 4 years, but legal issues such as rules changing and politics, legal issues, and additional planning tend to push this up to 6-15 years in extreme cases. To draw a parallel: building a 1GW windmill farm, such as the Thorsminde off shore windmill farm is estimated to take 5 years of pure construction time, and politics and legal issues have so far added 4 years to this from the day it was announced, giving a total construction time of about 9 years without delays.
Cost wise, Thorsminde is projected to cost 2.1 billion USD, and that’s without running costs, possible delays, or deconstruction costs at its 30 year end of life. The construction of a nuclear plant usually ( as in the projects that have been finished and we know the total construction costs of) costs anywhere from 6 to 9 billion USD. So yes, nuclear is more expensive, as you said.
Of course windmills don’t just pop out of the ground, so heavy machinery will also be required, and the sound of the hammers building the foundation will likely drive away any sound sensitive life in a 100-200 km radius, such as whales. This can be partly mitigated by running the hammers at lower power, adding about 30-50% (might be more, foundations take a long time to build) additional construction time and driving up the price.
The windmills will also change the life of the area dramatically throughout its life, VS nuclear, which requires mines that cause decent damage, but do not pollute in any significant way at the reactor site (unless you pump the waste water from the usually closed first loop directly out to the rivers and sea, or swear on running the power plant without cooling towers during droughts).
Also the resources needed to make a 1GW wind farm are immense, and contrary to nuclear, we can’t currently reuse the waste from deconstruction, which there also is quite a lot more of. Furthermore, maintenance will be hell, as you have much more moving parts (not per windmill, but per farm, which has multiple windmills) as a nuclear plant.
Do you realise that you can also build windmills… where you would put the Power Plant? On Land? And that would reduce the time and cost of construction?
You could also fill barren fields with solar panels and use space that not even a solar plant could use, this in turn also gives animals shade and helps biodiversity and bug species.
And doesnt have a third of its construction cost as running costs forever.
You can also scale wind turbines in minutes. Look at France how much it costs to have nuclear plants not running.
You do realise how much space windmills would need to produce as much power as a single nuclear plant, right? That is also the reason we try to build them in the water.
And when did I write anything about nuclear waste? I specifically pointed out that I was talking about deconstruction waste, where cooling towers turbines, and general facilities can be reused, and only the core shielding of the nuclear reactor has to be specially disposed of, versus the wings and foundation of windmills, which we don’t really know what to do with right now, so we kinda just bury them wherever and hope it doesn’t come back to bite us later.
You didn’t. I did. What about nuclear waste? It doesnt go away and if we build so much nuclear we also have so much more waste.
The blades can be recycled btw. we just dont do it because we dont have capacity for them.
Which brings me back to the nuclear waste. Oh and Fukushima. Chernobyl. When are we getting rid of those?
The amount of waste produced is extremely small for how much power you get, and is dealt with in exactly the same we we deal with literally all of our garbage: put it under ground and call it a day.
Microreactors aren’t that big. The one in the picture is from terrapower, the nuclear company Gates is funding, but they aren’t that close to production. The ones that have or are close to have DOE approval, are the size of a garden shed, and can power something like a couple of neighborhoods, or a datacenter. Might need two for a datacenter. They are self-sufficient, small, clean, and take almost no hand holding.
The article is talking about small modular reactors, which is basically taking hte micro reactor concept and scaling it just a little larger, and creating a power plant, that you can add more modules on to increase the size and power output. It’s kind of a hybrid concept between a standard power plant and a classic nuclear plant. They don’t take 10 years to build, you’re not bulding that giant containment building, because the reactors are small and easy to replace and manage. China has already done this in several places while we dwaddle and waste time being scared of old ways of thinking.
Just fill the Country with Solar, Wind and Water… won’t take 10 years and will be cheaper too.
Hydropower is about as bad for most ecosystems as burning fossil fuels. And its definitely not something that can be done quick or cheaply.
And a dam failure isn’t that much better than a nuclear accident, and far more common and less regulated
Just building and completing a damn is worse for the environment and local ecosystems than a category seven catastrophic nuclear accident.
You’re getting downvoted, but there’s some truth in it. You don’t just build a dam, you flood thousands of square miles and destroy hundreds of microcosms. Species have gone extinct due to dams. Not to mention that you can literally never remove them, because stupid humans build cities at their feet.
Ive come to find on reddit and lemmu that people don’t actually understand anything about nuclear energy, citing how bad Chernobyl is yet ignoring that not only is there still life in the exclusion zone, new species have emerged and been identified, where as successful dams that didn’t have any failures irrevocably damage and destroyed ecosystem upstream and downstream.
Not to mention that in the hundred years of nuclear plants, 30 people have died in TOTAL. Coal mines have killed a hundred thousand in the US alone, and windmills kill a few thousand in the UK alone each year. Nuclear has only killed 30 people. In a hundred years. Fukishima didn’t hurt a single person.
Whats the source on it being about as bad?
It releases methane, yes.
We don’t have to do hydro. Wind and the Sun are already plenty enough.
UNs IPCC Reports https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/Chapter-5-Hydropower-1.pdf See fig 5.15. The outliers are the concern (and yes, it’s pretty much methane)
Edit: I reread the parent comment, the above won’t address what you asked for, but is interesting nonetheless so I’ll leave it
Thank you for the paper.
This does indeed clarify exact numbers that i didnt have.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Nuclear produces the least emissions over it’s life cycle and has a safety rating that flip flops with solar depending on how they want to classify accidents in construction and preparation.
If you want a sustainable, clean and reliable future, your power grid needs Wind, Solar and Nuclear. There is absolutely no reason to exclude Nuclear Power from any green energy plan.
OWID is probably the shittiest source on this topic. It’s funded by Bill Gates, who also directly funds nuclear power companies.
I hear a lot of people trash talking OWID but never see anyone disputing the data or otherwise proving it’s wrong. And the information it presents on a whole lines up with other information provided by other research, surveys and data points.
Nonsense, Microsoft will just put lots of PMs and Scrum masters on the task and they’ll have a working reactor in 1 year max.
/s, just in case any PMs are reading this and think it’s totally reasonable
Estimate is 10 years? OK let’s 10x the workforce and get it done in 1
Also, little known fact, 9 women can deliver one single baby in 1 month from conception!
Can’t argue with those numbers.
Power density matters. And nuclear is pretty fucking dense haha
… for some applications. Not most tho. Really like 5. Everything else should be solar/wind/hydro
… And cause a lot of pollution and ecological stress, unless you funnel a LARGE amount of money and time into it.
Do you want to argue, that the construction of a nuclear power plant causes significantly less ecological stress and pollution than solar panels and windturbines?
Think about if you really want to claim that as a thing you actually believe in.
I’m just gonna throw some words in a pool.
concrete, steel, space, deforestation, river, 10+ Years construction time, heavy machinery, dust, natural habitats, fuel, mining, waste, noise, cost, france…
Thank you. i rest my case.
Those wind turbines and solar panels also get constructed, and affect a much larger area. It’s not an obvious comparison
Duh, Yes things have to be built. A Windmill is built in a few weeks by way less people and has no risk of exploding into a huge cloud of death.
Obviously building one wind turbine is less disruptive, but you need hundreds to get the same output, and they only work when it’s windy.
It’s always windy. We live on a spinning planet.
Solar needs sun. Nuclear needs water to cool. Hydro needs water.
If you combine solar and wind you can replace many nuclear plants by just using the space we are already using.
There are a lot of good arguments for wind, and I’m not arguing against it, but density and consistency are well known issues. You absolutely cannot replace a nuclear plant with a wind farm of the same size and get the same output. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, wind farms can often coexist with other land uses, but that’s still a disruptive environment.
It’s good to put pressure on nuclear, the reason it’s so incredibly safe is because it’s highly regulated, but to completely ignore it is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The question isn’t “are nuclear plants perfectly safe”, the question is “will adding nuclear plants to our energy portfolio reduce the risks from climate change enough to offset the risks they introduce.”
I think, in that framework, replacing existing coal power plants with modern nuclear reactors is a huge overall benefit.
Wind and solar are great but there’s still a lot of work needed on storage and transmission before they can be viable grid scale. Realistically, saying no to nuclear doesn’t mean more wind, it means more natural gas. And those LNG tankers really are floating bombs.
A dam has a higher probability of exploding than a Nuclear Reactor. A WIND TURBINE has a higher probability of exploding than a Nuclear Reactor.
I havent heard of a Wind Turbine causing Fukushima. I think it was Nuclear.
What was the other one… Chernobyl Wind and Solar Farm?
Wow two whole accidents in a hundred years? One of them didn’t hurt a single person? The other only killed 30 people? Crazy! That’s SO dangerous?
What…? Coal mining killed a hundred thousand people in the last century? In the US alone? Wind turbines kill a few dozen a year in just the UK alone?
Aren’t you forgetting something?
Liquidators also died way after the explosion from having to clean up all the rubble.
You can still not live in the area and will probably not be able to in many lifetimes.
More people have died working in Wind than Nuclear. And Nuclear has lower carbon emissions than Wind Turbines to boot. I’m not arguing we shouldn’t be using Wind Turbines, we absolutely should, but the best, cleanest energy grid human kind can hope for right now is a combination of Solar, Wind and Nuclear, because each of three has very distinct advantages and disadvantages that complement each other while doing the least ecological and environmental damage compared to other alternatives.
Building dams literally kills whole ecosystems. Reduce biodiversity and razes woodland. They also do tend to take 10+ year of construction, just like nuclear power, while taking several times more materials. Your point is really stupid, nuclear power plants do not cause any more ecological stress than a moderate building in any city. They do consume vasts amounts of water, which can be an ecological issue, but not to the level that a dam creates. Wind turbines, for example, are not recyclable (materials used are too complex and use a lot of plastic) and they disrupt birds population. Just like solar panels, they have a very very short lifespan. Windturbines must be replaced every 5 years or so. So does solar panels but for different reasons. A nuclear power plant can create power for several decades if well maintained.
The thing is, no human intervention in any place is sustainable. Our mere mode of existence is so energy intensive that we are going to destroy the planet’s habitability no matter what we do. The time to change to 100% nuclear was 5 decades ago. The time to stop using fossil fuels was 4 decades ago. The time to change to sustainable energy was 3 decades ago. We lost the train. The planet won’t support us in any form in the long run. Hell, mammals might also be fucked within the next million years. The planet will never ever be the same it was during the past 2 million years. And it’s because of us.
Look at France to see how 100% nuclear would have gone.
Half of those aren’t even relevant.
The actual construction takes about 4 years, but legal issues such as rules changing and politics, legal issues, and additional planning tend to push this up to 6-15 years in extreme cases. To draw a parallel: building a 1GW windmill farm, such as the Thorsminde off shore windmill farm is estimated to take 5 years of pure construction time, and politics and legal issues have so far added 4 years to this from the day it was announced, giving a total construction time of about 9 years without delays.
Cost wise, Thorsminde is projected to cost 2.1 billion USD, and that’s without running costs, possible delays, or deconstruction costs at its 30 year end of life. The construction of a nuclear plant usually ( as in the projects that have been finished and we know the total construction costs of) costs anywhere from 6 to 9 billion USD. So yes, nuclear is more expensive, as you said.
Of course windmills don’t just pop out of the ground, so heavy machinery will also be required, and the sound of the hammers building the foundation will likely drive away any sound sensitive life in a 100-200 km radius, such as whales. This can be partly mitigated by running the hammers at lower power, adding about 30-50% (might be more, foundations take a long time to build) additional construction time and driving up the price.
The windmills will also change the life of the area dramatically throughout its life, VS nuclear, which requires mines that cause decent damage, but do not pollute in any significant way at the reactor site (unless you pump the waste water from the usually closed first loop directly out to the rivers and sea, or swear on running the power plant without cooling towers during droughts).
Also the resources needed to make a 1GW wind farm are immense, and contrary to nuclear, we can’t currently reuse the waste from deconstruction, which there also is quite a lot more of. Furthermore, maintenance will be hell, as you have much more moving parts (not per windmill, but per farm, which has multiple windmills) as a nuclear plant.
Do you realise that you can also build windmills… where you would put the Power Plant? On Land? And that would reduce the time and cost of construction?
You could also fill barren fields with solar panels and use space that not even a solar plant could use, this in turn also gives animals shade and helps biodiversity and bug species.
And doesnt have a third of its construction cost as running costs forever.
You can also scale wind turbines in minutes. Look at France how much it costs to have nuclear plants not running.
In what way can we reuse the nuclear waste?
You do realise how much space windmills would need to produce as much power as a single nuclear plant, right? That is also the reason we try to build them in the water.
And when did I write anything about nuclear waste? I specifically pointed out that I was talking about deconstruction waste, where cooling towers turbines, and general facilities can be reused, and only the core shielding of the nuclear reactor has to be specially disposed of, versus the wings and foundation of windmills, which we don’t really know what to do with right now, so we kinda just bury them wherever and hope it doesn’t come back to bite us later.
You didn’t. I did. What about nuclear waste? It doesnt go away and if we build so much nuclear we also have so much more waste.
The blades can be recycled btw. we just dont do it because we dont have capacity for them.
Which brings me back to the nuclear waste. Oh and Fukushima. Chernobyl. When are we getting rid of those?
The amount of waste produced is extremely small for how much power you get, and is dealt with in exactly the same we we deal with literally all of our garbage: put it under ground and call it a day.
Goddamnit France. Classic France.
Microreactors aren’t that big. The one in the picture is from terrapower, the nuclear company Gates is funding, but they aren’t that close to production. The ones that have or are close to have DOE approval, are the size of a garden shed, and can power something like a couple of neighborhoods, or a datacenter. Might need two for a datacenter. They are self-sufficient, small, clean, and take almost no hand holding.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-nuclear-microreactor
The article is talking about small modular reactors, which is basically taking hte micro reactor concept and scaling it just a little larger, and creating a power plant, that you can add more modules on to increase the size and power output. It’s kind of a hybrid concept between a standard power plant and a classic nuclear plant. They don’t take 10 years to build, you’re not bulding that giant containment building, because the reactors are small and easy to replace and manage. China has already done this in several places while we dwaddle and waste time being scared of old ways of thinking.