With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.
Now I’m more depressed than when I posted this
I don’t think we ever stopped mining it
Yes, the correct answer is that “net zero” Is a greenwashed lie to placate the masses into inaction while the oligarchy continues business as usual until collapse.
https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to-the-apocalypse-7790666afde7
I thought net zero meant there was no net co2 being emitted at any time? This is saying countries can claim net zero by just promising to remove co2 in the future. I’ve never seen it used that way, is that the common understanding?
The way people get to net zero is stupid accounting tricks. I burned a whole bunch of coal, but i paid a buddy of mine to plant trees. So now Im celebrating net zero with my buddy in his brand new tesla roadster. Who knew planting trees was so lucrative.
So we need good regulation to make sure the carbon is being sequestered. If planting trees and then burying them actually gets carbon permanently out of the atmosphere, I’m all for it. I would love planting trees to be lucrative, we could use more forests, they’re great!
No one is actually burying trees. What happens is that after the contract ends they can just cut down the trees, release the carbon and start again.
I do agree with better regulation but forrestry ones should just go.
Oh I just remembered, someone who worked at an arboretum who I met a while ago mentioned that trees actually diffuse carbon dioxide directly into the soil. I think he said it was about one third of the weight of the tree? That amount would still be sequestered even if the tree wasn’t buried. But I don’t know how stable that is over the long term.
For offsets to work, they’d need to be based on the actual science of how much carbon they trap over what period of time. Different methods would need to have offset values published by the government. But I agree, offsets with algie or similar look much more feasible than trees.
Not that this happens in real life, but a solution could be a law declaring those lands national reserves and not allowing for extraction anymore.
paid a buddy of mine to plant trees.
It’s actually worse than that they are paying people to not cut down trees. It’s the same logic when my GF says she saved $200 because the dress was half price.
It’s a lie because several of the dependent solutions are essentially impossible to achieve (given time, technology, resources, investment, economics, etc), as well as being the bare minimum necessary to avert disaster, with a deadline decades after it’s required to avert disaster.
Read the link to understand why.
I don’t see a link
Why “going back to it” have we ever stopped?
I was going to say, coal remains around 1/3 of our electric generation worldwide (as of 2022): https://www.statista.com/statistics/269811/world-electricity-production-by-energy-source/
Coal can’t be reused, created, or otherwise obtained outside of mining. Until we remove our dependency on coal, mining will continue.
No. Among other things it remains the linchpin of energy security for industrial countries like China and Germany that lack adequate domestic oil or natural gas reserves to power their economies with those.
Germany had plenty of nuclear energy but decided they wanted to shut them all down. Now they have to use coal and LNG.
Yes. And even before the Russia mess they were going to replace nuclear with LNG, which is still pretty bad.
While in hindsight not all the decisions of the German energy policies seem right and it would have been better to keep the nuclear power plants operating for a few years, there was never the plan to replace nuclear with coal. All of the nuclear power generation has been replaced by wind and solar power generation. In fact, the plan was to phase out nuclear and replace the remaining coal generation with natural gas power plants. This definitely got more difficult in the time of LNG. The plan in any case is to phase out coal as well and with 56% renewable generation in 2023 Germany is on track to do so.
If only 56% is renewable, what exactly was nuclear replaced with, if not fossil fuels?
I hope this is a serious question, obviously this depends on your baseline. In 2013 Germany had a 56% share of fossil fuels, 27% share of renewables and 17% share of nuclear power generation. In the current year, the shares are: 59% renewables, 39% fossil fuels and 2% nuclear power generation. So in the last ten years there has been a switch in generation from both nuclear and fossil fuels to renewable generation. Could it have been better in the wake of the looming crisis of both climate and energy? Yes, I think it would have been better to keep some newer nuclear power plants running. But Cpt. Hindsight always has it easier.
In the long run every successful economy will generate its major share of electricity from renewables. Some countries will choose to generate a part with nuclear, others will choose to use a mix of hydrogen, batteries etc. to complement renewables. We will see what works best.
Hydrogen isn’t a fuel source. It’s at best an energy storage technology, and you know you generate hydrogen? Electricity so if 56% of your electricity is renewables, then 44% is fossil fuels, and that is still WAY too much.
Why replace nuclear and not coal though, seems like a pretty stupid choice
While I agree that it would have been better to phase out coal before nuclear power plants, I also think that those decisions have to be viewed in context and are more nuanced than ‘pretty stupid’.
For example, as other in this thread pointed out, nuclear power plants can be pretty safe to operate IF there is a good culture of safety and protocols in place. Which of course need to be followed and supervised by a strong regulatory body. Two of nuclear power plants in Brunsbüttel and Krümmel were missing this kind of safety culture in the opinion of the regulatory body. They were both operated by Vattenfall. If you lose trust in the operator of such critical infrastructure, then a decision to shut down nuclear power plants has to factor in all the arguments at hand.
That’s a fair point
Oil propaganda convinced millions of people that renewable energy sources like nuclear power or wind turbine were dangerous/ineffective.
Basically humans are stupid and don’t like change and rich people know and took advantage of it.
How is nuclear renewable?
It’s renewable the same way as the sun is: Not, but it will last for a really, really long time.
Because the amount of fuel used in a nuclear reactor is exponentially less than fossil fuels.
There’s enough nuclear material on this planet to power nuclear reactors for tens of thousands of years.
Nuclear power is clean, efficient, and lasts for essentially ever
It’s close to ‘renewable’ but technically it should be called ‘low carbon fuel’.
That’s like saying air isn’t renewable…
There are processes on our planet renewing air. I’m not aware of similar processes for fission materials.
It’s renewable in the same way that solar is. Eventually the sun will die and solar won’t work just like we’ll eventually run out of fissible material.
where’s the carbon in nuclear?
The graphite neutron moderator.
As with all power plants, wind turbines, solar panels, etc. there are carbon costs associated with the manufacturing, construction and transport. Remember that there’s a lot of steel involved.
The carbon expended in producing the fuel is a good example.
It’s an interesting take. I guess the sun is not renewable either.
Is any practically infinite (in human scales) source of energy called renewable? I am hearing this for the first time.
You are asking The Last Question It’s one of those short stories that you’ll read once and think about it occasionally for the next 20 years
I don’t understand this comment.
How is the sun not renewable?
Renewable energy means using renewable resources. Meaning things that either replenish themselves within a short enough period or things that produce massive amounts of energy over long periods of time.
Because the sun is also a depleting source of energy. I question the definition of renewable that’s all.
I would have never considered nuclear energy being renewable, but I guess a similar argument could be made.
The sun will exist for hundreds of thousands of years after humanity has gone extinct. The sun will exist for millions of years before it burns out. Humanity will thrive diminish and die before the sun dies.
It is by all intents and purposes an infinite resource for a finite species.
The sun will exist for hundreds of thousands of years after humanity has gone extinct. The sun will exist for millions of years before it burns out.
Your timescales are off. Even if humanity lasts a very long time, which seems unlikely, the sun will last for billions of years after humanity is gone. In one billion years the sun will have become hotter so that life becomes impossible on Earth. There will be four billion years of a lifeless Earth before the sun expands into a red giant and either swallows up or cooks the Earth. One billion years after that the sun will kick off its outer layers into a nebula and become a white dwarf. At that point it’s not reacting any more so it just gradually cools down over billions more years until it’s just a cool lump.
Technically speaking, it does not renew itself. It is being slowly depleted. You are right in saying that we can treat it as a renewable source as far as us and our technologies are concerned.
The sun will eventually explode.
Long after humanity has ceased to exist.
I’m quite certain we can manage to stop existing before nuclear fuel runs out as well.
It’s not big enough to explode, it’ll have a heat death
We all drank the
oilkoolaidNuclear just leads to more war and destruction.
You…can’t be serious right now…can you? Or are you conflating nuclear power with nuclear bombs? Because the two are very different things.
As climate change leads to non-traditional weather, people won’t be able to farm in the same places. People will be displaced, famine will hit. Droughts will clear up water sources and fights over water rights will happen.
The only way to reduce the impact is big, non-emitting power that can run 24/7/365 and the only contender for that is hydro and nuclear. And we’ve already built hydro just about everywhere that’s feasible to do so. With a surplus of cheap energy, we can improve hydroponics/vertical farming, reduce transportation needs for food (by growing it closer to population centers), and develop a means of scalable desalination.
Nah. Nuclear will prevent far more war.
nuclear power and nuclear bombs are the same.
As long as nuclear power exists, it will be used to pursue bombs.
Not to mention that nuclear power is incredibly unsafe and damaging
Coal mining kills more people per year than nuclear does. Pollution kills more people by several magnitudes than nuclear ever could. When proper safety measures are put in place it’s by far the safest form of energy. And regardless of whether people make nuclear power plants, the technology exists, so it will be used to make bombs regardless
You can make an explosive out of a pressure cooker, therefore everyone that buys a pressure cooker is a domestic terrorist! You’re welcome FBI
You’ve bought the misinformation.
Even if you get rid of every nuclear power plant, governments will still pursue bombs.
By your logic we should stop using wind power because more people have died per kWh produced than nuclear https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
There are newer models of plants that dont produce the byproducts needed for nuclear armaments. The problem is that our governments want those byproducts for nuclear armaments so the safer reactors were never built.
Nuclear power plants used to be built from repurchased nuclear weapon factories so if anything it leads to less war and destruction
It never stopped. Hasn’t even really slowed down.
People need electricity. Renewables are great, but they don’t provide for the full generation need. Coal and natural gas power generation will continue unabated until a better (read: lower price for similar reliability) solution takes their place.
In my opinion, fossil fuel generation won’t take a real hit until the grid-scale energy storage problem is solved.
Hasn’t even really slowed down.
I think thats… not wrong per say, but somewhat misleading. Coal consumption has been steady worldwide for the last decade despite the population going up a whole billion, and as the average persons energy usage has gone up (largely as a result of growing quality of life in developing nations).
Absolutely. Coal has remained consistent as demand for power has risen steadily. Renewables are growing, but remain a tiny slice of the whole generation picture.
Natural gas has become a cheap and reliable replacement for coal over the last 10-15 years as it’s become less expensive to transport. Many coal plants have been converted, even. So as demand has risen, it’s natural gas, not renewables, that is filling the gap.
what is preventing renewables from providing full generation need?
Storage. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear generate power regardless of weather, day and night.
Solar generates plenty of electricity (with enough panels installed), but it slows down significantly under cloudy skies and stops entirely at night.
Wind generates plenty as well…unless the wind stops blowing.
The grid needs power all the time, not just when it’s sunny and windy. For renewables to actually compete, the excess power they generate during sunny and windy times needs to be stored for use when it’s dark and still.
As much as we applaud lithium batteries, our energy storage technologies are abysmally inefficient. We’re nowhere near being able to store and discharge grid-scale power the way we’d need to for full adoption of renewables. The very best we can do today (and I wish I were kidding) is pump water up a hill, then use hydroelectric generators as it flows back down. Our energy storage tech is literally in the Stone Age.
Don’t underestimate the battery potential of gravity!
According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity#:~:text=The round-trip energy efficiency,sources claiming up to 87%25. The round-trip efficiency of pumped storage is 70-80%, that’s pretty darn good for cheap mass-storage. There’s not much more to gain there.
Pumped water is about the only practical gravity battery, but it has limitations.
- It can only be built in a few geographical locations.
- This tends to limit it’s overall capacity unless you’re Norway or Switzerland.
- It requires flooding an area to make a storage lake and so has a high environmental impact.
- Building power stations inside mountains is difficult and expensive.
So it’s great stuff, but I don’t think it’s going to be the backbone of any storage solution we have.
It works very well, not disputing that.
But, like geothermal power generation (which is also very good), it’s extremely dependent on location. Most populated areas don’t have the altitude differential (steep hills) and/or water supply to implement pumped hydro storage.
Where it can be used, it should be (and largely is - fossil fuel generation does better with some storage as well, since demand is not consistent), but it’s hardly something that can be deployed alongside solar and wind generators everywhere.
With some high voltage long-range transmission lines you could viably do it pretty much everywhere. Just requires some cooperation.
Yes it will slightly reduce efficiency over very long distances, but it’s not unreasonable amounts.
Long range transmission of AC power is limited to about 40 miles. DC can be transmitted much farther, but the infrastructure is substantially more expensive (because it’s more dangerous), so that’s only done for extreme need.
We aren’t getting away from having many power generators all over the place, so one location-dependent storage solution isn’t going to solve all the problems.
I might also add there’s smart algorithms being developed for about 5y+ now that distribute power surplus and deficiency over a grid. This will probably be key. Just take a look at “energy metering”.
ah you already beat me to the response, pumped hydro is already utility scale baseline power supply
Cost, resources availability, and fluctuations in supply.
my energy bill right now is like a new solar panel a month. what resources do we not have, and are you familiar with pumped storage? spoilers, we already have renewable stable energy supply
The truth is, we do have enough resources. We just care more about the economy and profit than our future climate (which will also strongly affect the economy, but that’s in the future so…).
If we actually valued the climate as much as we ought to, switching fully to renewables would be a bargain.
We dont’ really care about the economy, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing this boom-bust shit and we’d have a better planned economy that would ensure there wasn’t a perpetual under-class of starving people in every industrialized nation.
Our Government DO care about making sure their donors get paid though.
Everything has a cost of course, building solar panel requires a significant amount of precious metals, which may or may not be easily accessible or affordable depending on the political climate between countries who mine vs the countries who needs the resources.
And the production of solar panel does create some toxic leftovers which needs to make handled appropriately. Not saying they’re a bad alternative and they’re definitely before than fossil fuel or coal, just needs to consider the cost and the impact of everything.
building solar panel requires a significant amount of precious metals
Mmm, no, no they dont. Solar panels are primarily made from silicon. Sand.
They also need
- Copper
- Cobalt
- Nickel
- Lithium
- Chromium
- Zinc
- Aluminium
and some others rare-earth elements, as well as some platinum-group metals. The current photocell chemistry we use is quite complex.
Time. People can see past the storage issue when it’s not that big of an issue.
Interconnectors and curtailment at peak output are economically optimal. The renewable transition doesn’t seem to be slowing.
The renewable boom has only been going for about 10 years. Give it another 10-20 and the world will look drastically different in one generation.
Oh itll look different in 20 years alright, with how slow this is going.
that’s uh, a 5% increase over 20 years for US. Another 20 years and renewables might make up 20% of our power! With skyrocketed energy demands for AC keeping us alive from the hellscape outside.
The us is is doing shit because their population doesn’t care and the management is poor.
But it’s about exponentials and us is just far behind where it should be.
Coal us and fossil fuels is crashing in Europe and China might have hit peak petrol usage.
The S curve is well in its way.
There are concerns outside of the list you wrote. For example:
- people need energy and coal is a source of energy
And they’re going for coal in some places because the political situation has made other reliable energy sources unavailable:
- the Russia-Ukraine war has destroyed natural gas supply lines to Europe
- anti-nuclear activism has resulted in lack of nuclear investment
Outside of coal, nuclear, and natural gas, there aren’t many options for reliable sources of electricity.
Why are people so against nuclear? It doesn’t make any sense.
Nuclear is probably the safest form of power when proper protocols are put in place but it’s hard to do that when the largest country in Europe (Russia, both by size and population) is currently in a war
This. Nuclear safety requires active habit keeping and protocols, hence is dependent on social stability.
Safer than wind and solar?
Oddly enough, it’s safer than wind.
Solar’s a little better in that regard, but all three are so much safer than any high-carbon sources of energy that any of them are great options.
I can’t look at their sources, so I’m going to believe them, buuut that is death per energy units. And I can’t argue that nuclear isn’t more efficient and generally safe. Presumably though, those injuries from wind are from construction primarily? Nuclear power plants have been out of fashion since the 80s for some reason, so there aren’t really equal opportunities for construction incidents to compare that while wind construction has been on the rise. And I can only assume that after construction, the chance incidents only go down for wind while they can really only go up for nuclear.
None of that is to say that nuclear is bad and we shouldn’t use it. Statistics like this just always bug me. Globally we receive more energy from wind than nuclear. It stands to reason that there’s more opportunity for deaths. It’s a 1 dimensional stat that can easily be manipulated. it’s per thousand terawatt per hour, including deaths from pollution. So I got curious and did some Googling.
After sorting through a bunch of sites without quite the information I was looking for, I found some interesting facts. I was wrong in my assertion that wind deaths don’t go up after being built. Turns out, most of those deaths come from maintenance. It does seem to vary by country, and I can’t find it broken down by country like I wanted. It’s possible that safety protections for workers could shift it. But surprisingly, maintenance deaths from nuclear power are virtually non existent from what I can tell. It seems like the main thing putting nuclear on that list at all is including major incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima. Well, Fukushima has really only been attributed for 4 deaths total. And Chernobyl was obviously preventable. So it looks like you’re right! Statistically, when including context, is definitely the least deadly energy source (if we ignore solar).
I believe so because of construction injuries but idk how well that scales
Russian war has little to do with it. For example Germany had already decided to scrap nuclear for gas, which actually bit them in the ass when the war started.
You’re right with Germany’s decision.
The reason why Russia is mentioned might be that Russia (and one of their close allies Kazakhstan) are the source of a good chunk of the Uranium that’s used in Europe’s nuclear power plants.
Sweden has large stores of uranium but the green party has opposed any new mines (uranium or not) on environmental grounds. Ignoring the fact that we then have to import resources from other countries that don’t have regulations which could minimize pollution
What is safe on Nuckear Power Plants?
It’s enough for hundredthousand of years, if only one time happens a SuperGAU. Only once is enough.
And the nuclear waste is dangerous as fuck for also hundredthousand of years.
And you can produce 30, 40 or maybe 50 years electric energy, and it needs the same time to decontaminate and dismantle a nuclear powerplant. And before it takes 20, 30 or mor years, to build such a plant… This is not cheap, not safe and not sustainable.
I don’t trust the US Federal government to properly dispose of it. The waste from the Manhattan Project is buried in a landfill, a landfill that’s on fire.
The problem isn’t fire, it’s that the waste at Hanford has leached into the soil and a plume of it is headed towards the Hanford Reach on the Columbia River. There’s a mitigation plan in place and it looks like it’s ultimately going to work, but it’s very expensive and not something that anyone wants to see happen again.
I was referring to the Westlake Superfund site in St Louis right next to the Missouri river
Nuclear waste is not dangerous when handled correctly. I’d recommend checking out Kyle Hill on YouTube about this, but when mixed with cement/sand in large amounts it becomes safe much more quickly than that. A lot of the dangers of nuclear power are actually misconceptions
- Fukushima
- Chernobyl
- 3-Mile Island to name a few
Yes yes, we know people don’t understand statistics.
I’m looking forward to seeing your Instagram snaps once you move back to pripyat permanently. Statistics never tell the full story.
Ah yes, the clusterfuck of the 20th century is the lode stone
Also Pripyat isn’t that bad.
If you’re referring to the nukes-are-statistically-safe argument, then to be fair, you also have to take into account the scale of their failures.
Right it would be something involving number of people harmed, for number of joules or watt-hours of energy produced. How much injury, death, etc is there on a per-unit basis. That would be how you’d get a probability of harm. Then you could compare it numerically with other forms of energy to see which is the safest, statistically speaking.
Time to start dismantling wind turbines then? https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
3 Mile Island occurred while “The China Syndrome” was in theaters.
That’s mostly it. A hit-job sensationalist film came out right before a minor incident that resulted in ZERO injuries, damage to the environment, or loss of containment, but was major news largely because of the film.
Because of Godzilla is my best guess. CGI is so good these days people think it’s real.
Fukushima and Chernobyl kinda stick out. Nuclear is safe until something goes catastrophically wrong. When that happens it’s 100s and 1000s of years before you can move back in and have a stable genome.
it’s not about the power but about the waste. no one wants that in their backyard.
It’s been long established that coal produces more radioactive waste than nuclear power, and largely dumps it straight into the environment.
Somehow people think it’s worse if you keep it contained rather than massively diluted. If we thought of it like we do radiation in coal waste, we’d be happy to just dump it in the ocean.
Living in Finland, I’m proud of the fact that we’ve got one of the first long-term/final storage sites for nuclear waste in the world. YIMBY.
You guys have that super deep underground storage site right?
Real talk, why can’t we just launch that shit into the sun? Obviously, I understand the risk of a rocket filled with spent fuel rods exploding is low Earth orbit and the weight to cost ratio, but are there other reasons?
It’s insanely more expensive than any of the other options, even the long-term storage deep down underground with further burial and complete abandonment of the location in a way that would make the location as unremarkable as possible, preventing future generations developing interest to potential markings.
Tom Scott has a great, rather concise video about that. It’s not really just ground, but rock, making it even more secure and unaffected, especially given that the waste is first sealen into special containers.
The waste is vitrified, meaning that it’s encased in what’s basically solid glass.
Basically to put something in the sun you’ve got to bring it to a near-standstill relative to the sun. You have to slow it down from the speed Earth is orbiting at (2 * Pi AU/year) to almost zero. It takes a ton of rocket fuel to do that.
That plus the danger you mentioned makes burying it the cheaper and safer option.
It’s literally easier to launch something outside the solar system than launching it into the sun.
🤣
Nuclear power is a bit like aviation. Statistically, traveling by airliner is the safest way to travel; it’s been over a decade since the last fatal crash of an American-registered airliner. But when a plane does crash, SHEEW BUDDY does it make the evening news.
Nuclear power has that same effect. Statistically, nuclear power has a fucking amazing safety record. Very, very few people are hurt or killed in the nuclear power industry, especially compared to the fossil fuel industry, and the second hand smoke factor is non-existent as long as the plant is operating correctly. But as soon as it does go wrong, SHEEW BUDDY does it make the evening news. And it has gone wrong, multiple times, in spectacular fashion.
A major concern I have about building new nuclear power plants is my government is trying as hard as it can to steer into the hard right anti-science anti-regulation of industry space, and successful, safe operation of nuclear power plants requires strong understanding of science and heavy government oversight. The fact that we have no plan whatsoever for the nuclear waste we’re already generating, and that no serious solution is on the horizon indicates to me that we are already not in a place where we should be doing this.
There’s also the concern that nuclear power programs are often related to manufacturing fuel for nuclear weapons. That that’s what the megalomaniacal assholes that are somehow “in charge” actually want nuclear power plants for, and megawatts of electricity to run civilization with is a cute bonus I guess.
What an excellent explanation you’ve written here. I love it. SHEEW BUDDY!
I agree that it shouldn’t be a matter of being for or against nuclear.
The best mix of renewable energy supply of any country is going to be very context dependent. Geothermal, hydro, solar, wind all perform best when they’re used in the right location. Nuclear energy is much more expensive per Megawatthour than renewable energy sources, but it’s highly predictable.
In addition to the high cost, the construction time of a nuclear power plant tends to be somewhere between 10-20 years. Therefore, it makes sense to find solutions first in grid balancing solutions like mega batteries (for balancing, not long term storage), smart EV chargers, and matching demand better with supply through variable pricing. These are all relatively affordable solutions that would reduce the need for a predictable energy supply like nuclear.
But, if the measures above are not enough or if there are concerns about the feasibility of such measures in a particular context, then analyses might point towards nuclear as a solution as the most cost effective solution.
It’s pointless to make nuclear power a polical issue while we’re rapidly approaching an irreversible climate crisis. We don’t have the luxury to act based on preferences. Policymakers shouldn’t view nuclear power as a taboo, but also shouldn’t opt to construct one simply to attract voters.
Back then, it was scared of what you don’t understand. Nuclear was bombs and radiation, bad stuff right. Then it was Chernobyl. And having talked with some of them online, they are scared that it’s not 10,000% safe.
Because it got cheaper than natural gas.
Nobody thinks it’s clean, they just don’t care.
Because the ecofanatics focused on fighting nuclear power for 50 years instead of fighting fossile fuels.
Fast forward to now, renewable are not ready at all and they need fossile fuels anyway to provide steady energy. But geopolitics is making oil too expensive, so countries are mining coal again.
In brief, ecofanatics were stupid (and still are) and war in Ukraine.
Were they stupid or deliberately misled, propagandized and manipulated by the fossil fuel industry? Sure some of them were stupid, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.
I’m an eco-fanatic and I am extremely pro-nuclear.
Yeah but that wasn’t the case in previous decades. Environmentalists have protested just about every nuclear power plant opening for the last 60 years. It might even still happen if we bothered to open more plants.
While environmental concerns, primarily regarding nuclear waste management, are probably the more public face of nuclear opposition, it is the economic burdens that have shut down nuclear plants before they even produce waste, as is the case with a number of canceled nuclear projects around the US at least.
Again? Did we stop?
It doesn’t look like anyone has mentioned metallurgical coal yet. Even if you don’t burn it for energy, the carbon in steel has to come from somewhere and that’s usually coke, which is coal that has been further pyrolised into a fairly pure carbon producing a byproduct of coal tar.
How much of that carbon is emitted Vs embedded in the steel matrix? 50%?
I’m not actually sure. I imagine it depends on how exactly it’s mixed in.
The green alternative would be to go back to charcoal (or “biochar” if you want to sound fancy), but it might be a bit more expensive.
So that’s where the name coke comes from! TIL!
Coal is just Cola with the letters swapped around.
Climate change ‘looming’? Dude, it’s already here.
Oh good, let’s quibble about semantics instead of actually discussing the meat of the problem.
First time online? But yes it’s annoying.
It’s not about semantics. It’s abut the fact that it’s already too late and people are still not doing anything. Why do people still mind coal? Because our civilization is not ready to deal with climate change. Nothing serious will be done about it.
Meat? I … I’m vegan!
/s
Sad reality people doesnt want to realise/acknowledge…
It didn’t, at least not in the way you think. The headlines of the past few days show the aftermath of the last decades: industry contracts that were made in the last century and the political heritage of a generation of politicians who are no longer in power.
Coal is being phased out and that’s not changing. It cannot change substantially anyway; there is only so much coal in the gound. Recent political decisions moved to keep most of it there. For technological, political, economical and industry related reasons this won’t be a fast process unfortunately.
One of the roadblocks of our transition to a sustainable energy supply is how much money (and in our capitalisic society, therefore, power) the industry itself holds. Coal lobbies will work hard for you not to think about them too much. Nuclear lobbies will work hard for you to blame those pesky environmentalists. A game of distraction and blame shifting. This thread is a good example of how well it’s working.
Our resources are limited. This is true for good old planet earth as well as our societies. We only have so much money, time, and workforce to manage this transition. And as much as I’d love to wake up tomorrow to a world with PVC on every roof, a windmill on every field, and decentralised storage in every town center, this is just not realistic overnight. We’ll have to live with the fact of our limited resources and divert as much as possible of them towards such a future. (And btw, putting billions of dollars in money, time, and workforce towards a reactor that will start working in 10-30 years is not the way to do this, as much as the nuclear lobby would like you to think that.)
As many people pointed out, we never stopped. Nor will be stop for decades to come. Unlike what people hear online, change takes time.
It’s also something I wish people would keep in mind more when evaluating whether decisions or even whole politicians and their terms have an effect or what effect: A large portion of your own term in an office is spent on realizing the decisions made by your predecessor, and/or trying to prevent their worst effects. Conversely, anything a current politician does will have most of it’s effects after they left office.
Oh absolutely. The first year of any new president will mostly be governed by what policies were signed under the previous president.
And many of times, certain agreements are multi year ones which yiu have little control over.
Either way, we have time. Yes, we shouldn’t lose momentum to keep the changes coming, but holy crap we have some people in here who never step away from the internet and are fed an endless stream of over hyped doom and gloom.
Time of something we don’t have the luxury of.
Relax. Get off the internet for a few days. We got time.
This is why the whole Stop Oil crew need to take a deep breath.
What do they think is going to happen if we suddenly stop using oil? It is phased approach but, no, bank’s are bad for funding them.
Reliance on oil and coal is an immediate human need but it will diminish.
When has it ever been a realistic worry that we would just very suddenly completely stop using oil? This is like being in a car careening down a hill and saying to the people saying “hit the brakes!” "Woah whoa, do you have any idea what would happen if we deccellerated to a complete stop in a millisecond? We’d be crushed flat! "
They’re all triggered into thinking the world is going to collapse tomorrow, and it is infuriating.
In 50 years, we’re still going to have cars that run on gas. We’ll still have plastic bags and straws. The world will not have ended.
The worst part of all this doom and gloom is that it is going to make some people think nothing can be done, so why bother. Then there are going to be some 9ther people who want change, but after a few years they will start to wonder why hasn’t the environmental apocalypse happened yet and start thinking it was all a sham. You already hear that from people who grew up in the 70s when the last time this kind of thought was spreading. Back then everything was about global warming this and global warming that. We were going to boil over all our oceans and everyone was going to die. That never happened, obviously. In more recent years scientists have changed their views to the current climate change model where they state that some parts of the globe will actually get colder while other parts will get hotter. We will have more severe storms. That seems to reflect more of what is happening these days, but even the most doom and gloom scientists aren’t claiming we will all die in a few short months. Yet that’s kind of the hysteria of far too many folks online.
Yes, we have to do something, but relax, it’s not going to all collapse by next week.
Maybe if we had decided to “stop oil” like 60years ago, it wouldn’t be an issue anymore? But since we didn’t 60 years ago, perhaps we should have plan to replace fossil fuels with something that burn and can provide power day or night, rain or shine and maybe we should start building these things NOW.
Because of the war against nuclear plants. Our green party shut down nuclear plants in favor for renewable energy. But as predicted, renewables don’t meet our demands. So the green party started building gas plants to compensate instead of keeping nuclear running.
So why? Because of green idiocracry that demand the impossible of green energy (at this moment) and nuclear = evil
In my country, because of a decades long fearmongering and disinfomation campaing that destoyed the nuclear energy industry. So now we’re stucked with coal to keep the power running at night and during winter.
Let’s be honest though, rivers running low in summer so plants had to shut down, core material being bought from Russia and overwhelming costs for dismantling old plants together with no solution at all for final storage also did their part in it.
But we could have worked on these issues for years by now. Abandoning the entire industry also lead to slowdown in research and inovation in the field. Of course now we’re hopelessly behind.
Oor the ressources could be better spent in renewables, which are available as long as the sun exists, while nuclear will run out of fuel within the 22cnd century.
Also with nuclear Europe is entirely dependent on imports, primarily from Russia and russia-aligned countries. Being pro nuclear in Europe means being pro Putin.
Nuclear won’t run out of fuel. But if renewable are so good, why are so many countries mining coal?
Oor we can do both so that in the middle of winter when there’s only 6 hrs of sun (less when cloudy) we can still have electricity without ridiculously sized batteries.
Also uranium is so energy dense it can be mined and refined in Canada or Australia and shipped so, so very easily.
False information. There is enough fissionable material to last humans 10s of thousands of years.
Do you all have a source for that?
https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
Several other studies estimate 90 thousand years. All of this is Uranium alone.
I don’t think I buy it. Like, there is a lot of uranium around the world, but most of it is prohibitively expensive to mine, the mining itself is extremely destructive, Australia has the largest uranium reserves but most of the rest is in the hands of authoritarian fuckwits like China and Russia, society’s collapsing into wars and suffering climate catastrophes around the world so the safety of nuclear plants is increasingly in doubt, it takes decades to build them…
Honestly, if we’re gonna spend decades on clean energy megaprojects, wouldn’t it be better to go with something like a space solar power station which is a lot safer and the rectennas on the surface a lot easier to fix and replace?
Australia and Canada both have very large amounts of nuclear fuel that are currently unused because of short-sighted comments like this.
Uranium city is coming back baby!
I am quite sure i know a thing or two about politics that happened during my lifetime and i actively followed. Also i used to be a proponent for nuclear power when i was younger. But unlike the nuclear shills i am willing to accept when a technology is inferior and risky.
I am quite sure i know a thing or two about politics that happened during my lifetime and i actively followed
Funny, so do I.
Anyway, believe that “being pro nuclear in Europe means being pro Putin” or what ever absurd things you come up with.
I was here to give my response to OPs question. Discussing energy politics with the average German is as pointless as discussing biology with an anti-vaxxer and I have no interest in it.
Which is why you immediate derail the conversation by making ad himinen attacks, instead of interacting with the arguments… No suprise you cannot discuss things, because you don’t want a discussion in the first place.
Why are you pro-coal?
i am pro renewables. It is the pro nuclear faction that tends to be pro coal too, just that they pretend they aren’t. But it is the same businesses, the same industries and the same lobbying against renewables that unit pro coal and pro nuclear.
They’re not wrong, I think initial estimates was 500 years, but that will change as more reactors get built.
That is indeed very wrong. With extracing Uranium from sea water and recycing fuel in breeder reacots, this goes up to like 90.000 years. And that’s just Uranium, other fuels can be explored.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. Theoretically, if everyone was using state-of-the-art designs of fast-breeder reactors, we could have up to 300,000 years of fuel. However, those designs are complicated and extremely expensive to build and operate. The finances just don’t make it viable with current technology; they would have to run at a huge financial loss.
As for Uranium for sea-water – this too is possible, but has rapidly diminishing returns that make it financially unviable quite rapidly. As Uranium is extracted and removed from the oceans, exponentially more sea-water must be processed to continue extracting Uranium at the same rate. This gets infeasible pretty quickly. Estimates are that it would become economically unviable within 30 years.
Realistically, with current technology we have about 80-100 years of viable nuclear fuel at current consumption rates. If everyone was using nuclear right now, we would fully deplete all viable uranium reserves in about 5 years. A huge amount of research and development will be required to extend this further, and to make new more efficient reactor designs economically viable. (Or ditch capitalism and do it anyway – good luck with that!)
Personally, I would rather this investment (or at least a large chunk of it) be spent on renewables, energy storage and distribution, before fusion, with fission nuclear as a stop-gap until other cleaner, safer technologies can take over. (Current energy usage would require running about 15000 reactors globally, and with historical accident rates, that’s about one major nuclear disaster every month). Renewables are simpler, safer, and proven ,and the technology is more-or-less already here. Solving the storage and distribution problem is simpler than building safe and economical fast-breeder reactors, or viable fusion power. We have almost all the technology we need to make this work right now, we mostly just lack infrastructure and the will to do it.
I’m not anti-nuclear, nor am I saying there’s no place for nuclear, and I think there should be more funding for nuclear research, but the boring obvious solution is to invest heavily in renewables, with nuclear as a backup and/or future option. Maybe one day nuclear will progress to the point where it makes more sound sense to go all in on, say fusion, or super-efficient fast-breeders, etc. but at the moment, it’s basically science fiction. I don’t think it’s a sound strategy to bank on nuclear right now, although we should definitely continue to develop it. Maybe if we had continued investing in it at the same rate for the last 50 years it might be more viable – but we didn’t.
Source for estimates: “Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?”, Prof. D. Abbott, Proceedings of the IEEE. It’s an older article, but nuclear technology has been pretty much stagnant since it was published.
Well, nuclear energy is expensive anyways and the amount of uranium on this world seems quite limited.
It’s just not the technology of the future. In the long term we should use regenerative energies that are way cheaper.
Nuclear is no more expensive than renewable. The amount of uranium is limited, but it’s not the only fuel for nuclear.
Sure it is. The World nuclear status report 2021 for example says it’s five times more expensive than wind energy.
And sure there are other fuels for nuclear. But I think most of them are even more limited?!
The paper doesn’t account account for availability. Nuclear has over 90% availability, which means for 1MW of power installed, you get on average over 0.9MW of power to use. Renewable are far below that, between 40 and 60% iirc. Which means you need to double the cost for a defined output. And that doesn’t consider batteries.
Unless the document talks about that, please point me to the right chapter then.
Damn. I shouldn’t have linked auch a long PDF. What are you talking about? I’m referring to the diagram (and text) on page 293. The annual Levelized Cost Of Energy.
It’s not only calculated on sunny days. They take the annual energy output for the calculation. Availability and everything included or these numbers wouldn’t make any sense.
And yes, we need batteries. But the nuclear plants also need other (faster) plants alongside. And this match isn’t a close call. With a 5 fold increase in being economical, we have plenty of money to spare to afford some batteries and hydroelectric dams.
I was looking at the building cost. Looking more into the Wikipedia article, it seems to account for availability. But the numbers are very speculative still, there is a crazy variation both for the specific data points and for the studies. Another big factor is the interest rate for investment which can double the cost of nuclear energy depending on the assumption.
Another thing that bother me is the speculative nature of these things. No photovoltaic power plant ever went through its whole lifespan. No significant energy production was made with variable renewable. Whereas nuclear was used for 70 years now. Yet the speculation makes it like nuclear will be expensive and unreliable and renewable will be cheap and reliable when the actual history is the exact opposite. Technology advances obviously, but still. I don’t consider renewable to be a tried and tested technology that scales while nuclear is.
Idk. Solar cells have been around for a while, too. Wind turbines are kind of simple devices. I bet an engineer can predict their maintenance cost and lifespan fairly accurate. Hydroelectric power plants have been around for more than 100 years. Electric cars have been invented before the combustion engine took off. Nuclear power has been around for some time. But you can’t use that as an argument and simultaneously argue about using thorium which large scale deployments are still hypothetical.
And I don’t think those numbers are 500% off. You can double some cost and were only at 200%. And they’re not complete speculation. They took the actual numbers of the previous year. And the years before that. These numbers are the ‘actual history’.
No significant energy production was made with variable renewable
Pardon? Norway? New Zealand? Switzerland? Iceland? Sweden? Countless others I probably forgot because I’m bad at geography? The USA and China, Philippines, Indonesia all have major ‘variable renewable’. Thousands and thousands of megawatts of energy are generated this way as of today. Then there is biomass if you’re geologically not that favored by nature, but I barely know anything about that. And who says we can’t use the sun and wind? Of course we can also use those.
Thorium is one of the most abundant material on earth. Unlike lithium for example.
Yeah. But the technology is - at this point - more sci-fi than anything else. Probably nothing we need to worry about in the next few years.
And you still need to mine some non-renewable resource. It’s still nuclear and produces waste. And it seems super expensive.
There are working thorium reactor for 50 years or something. Hardly sci-fy.
Renewables need batteries to work. Which needs lithium.
Sure. Just use molten salt energy storage, hydroelectric dams or whichever of the dozens of technologies makes most sense where you are.
Combine different kinds of renewables so you get power at night and when the wind isn’t blowing. Build more then enough and if you got excess energy, maybe make some hydrogen.
Have your devices and industry ‘smart’ so it draws less power when there’s less supply.
You really don’t need to do everything with ‘normal’ batteries like in a smartphone.
The ‘working’ thorium reactors are for research. They don’t generate energy. At least if we’re speaking about generating energy for a whole country. The planned thorium reactors of the next many years also don’t generate any significant amount of energy. With that argumentation we also (almost) have nuclear fusion power plants.
A thorium power plant that contributes to the power grid and shows up in the numbers is sci-fi. I mean, it’s not impossible. It’s just lots of very expensive work left to do.
Right, but that’s why people are talking about nuclear as a bridge technology, not as a permanent solution. Whether or not we can make it pencil out before smashing through all of the critical tipping points in global temperature averages is not something I’m qualified to have an opinion on, but I’m credibly informed that we might at least want to give it a serious look.
At one point in the future I’m sure we can look back, do the calculations and see if that had been a good bridge or an expensive thing for the taxpayer to deal with the dismantling and long time storage.
As of now I think the time of that bridge technology has come to an end anyways. We now have efficient renewable energies available. And concepts for energy storage. I think we should invest in that instead of putting the money into a thing of the past.
Well you didn’t google any of that.
Nuclear power plants are expensive to build but the cost of running one especially when adjusted to the amount of electricity it produces is not significantly more than running any other power plant. Also uranium is not considered to be a gobally scarce resource.
That’s also what I believed. But turns out nuclear is the most expensive kind of energy.
Here’s a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kahih8RT1k
(Seriously, watch it)
The high cost is largely explained by the fact that there’s no “standard model” for nuclear power plants but instead they’re all designed and built from scratch which can make them really expensive. Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland is the world’s 8th most expensive building at whopping 12 billion dollar cost to build. The original price estimate was 3 billion. Many of the buildings on that list ahead of Olkiluoto 3 are also nuclear power plants.
This however isn’t some inherent probem about nuclear power itself but rather the way we do it. It doesn’t need to be that expensive.
Yeah, I’m still not convinced. If current state of the art makes it 5 times more expensive than current state solar or wind. Your explanation needs to be more than ‘but we choose to build it more expensive than it needs to be’.
Sure theoretically this might not be an inherent problem. But the same applies to renewable. I’m not sure if solar or wind are close to something limiting their efficiency or cost of production. There might be new technology advancing both of them. We can talk about this and look for more information. But it’s a very hypothetical discussion. As of now in the real world, there are real-world power plants and if no-one can demonstrate to bridge that big gap in economic efficiency… Maybe there’s something to it…
And apart from that. I’d argue that there are some inherent problems. For example mega-projects having issues with their budget. That’s a very interesting topic but inherent to big and complex projects for several reasons. Also a nuclear plant and all the infrastructure around it is inherently more complex and more expensive than for example a wind turbine and what we need to assemble a bit of steel tubing, wings and a bit of copper. (Broadly speaking.) I think it’s a combination of factors. But I’d be surprised if the future holds something increasing the economic efficiency of nuclear (fission) power plants by that factor.
(Edit: Those numbers from the video are for the US. But 5 times more expensive is huge.)
We don’t choose to build it more expensive than it needs to be. It’s by nature always going to be more expensive to build one of something instead of what the cost per unit is going to be when you make many.
Wind and solar isn’t going to solve the issue untill we come up with a way to store energy on large scale. When you plug in an appliance that electricity is not taken from a reserve but it’s produced for you in real time. Wind doesn’t blow and sun doesn’t shine according to how much electricity is needed at each moment. Finland produces all its electricity basically by hydro, wind and nuclear power. When it’s windy we have excess electricity and the prices drops to negative and we got to sell it abroad but when it’s calm the opposite is true. This wouldn’t be the case if we could somehow store that excess energy.
cost per unit
We’re talking about effective cost of the resulting power, altogether. All things included. (Except for nuclear waste, which is a topic for a different discussion and difficult to quantify.) Just comparing one aspect wouldn’t be fair.
store energy on scale
Yeah, and science and investors are way ahead of politics. There are several concepts already available or already in place somewhere. Several promising ideas and projects that need funding. Storage facilities that aren’t able to store energy because Bavaria is not willing to run cables across the country. It is a complex topic that also needs individual solutions. For example depending on geography you could have dams and pump water. Or one of the concepts that work everywhere. Infrastructure and cunsumer get more advanced/intelligent. You could charge your car automatically during periods where renewable is abundant. You can fine-tune factories, maybe have the large heat pump of an office building vary temperature a bit when there is a Dunkelflaute. Some countries just get geothermal power for free because of their location… You can put those storage facilities close to energy generation or close to the consumer. And as supply and demand changes prices, it’s also well aligned with the way our economy (and capitalism) works.
We should really hurry up and put in the effort this needs. Because we really need those storage facilities. And I’d like energy costs to come down again, and CO2 emissions also.
And if I remember correctly, the current natural gas power plants are the ones that can react to supply and demand the most quickly. But this seems not to be a good idea anymore, now that we have enough problems with the natural gas in central europe. I (personally) would be happy if there was an alternative.
I haven’t heard any scientist in the last years tell something different from renewable plus storage is the way. Not unless some miracle happens and we get fusion reactors or something. But it’s still unclear it that’s going to happen.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=0kahih8RT1k
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Over here (Australia) we never stopped. Our coal lobby is simply too influential with our government.
I blame the release of both Factorio and Victoria 3.
