this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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Slow, expensive, riddeled with corruption, long ago surpassed by renewables. Why should we use it?
only antimatter could provide more energy density, it's insanely powerful.
produces amounts of waste orders of magnitude lower than any other means of energy production
reliable when done well
it shouldn't be replaced with renewables, but work with them
Nuclear energy indeed has very high energy per mass of fuel. But so what? Solar and wind power doesn't even use fuel. So the energy density thing is a bit of a distraction.
But it's not done well. Just look at the new built plants, which are way over budget and take way longer to build then expected. Like the two units in Georgia that went from estimated 14bn to finally 34bn $. In France who are really experienced with nuclear, they began building their latest plant in 2007 and it's still not operational, also it went from 3.3bn to 13.2bn €. Or look at the way Hinkley Point C in the UK is getting developed. What a shit show: from estimated 18bn£ to now 47bn£ and a day where it starts producing energy not in sight.
Do you know WHY they went over budget?
The same problems faced the oil industry too, with their drilling rigs & refineries (over budget and over schedule, with gov money grants and subsidies), it's just less in the media & more spread out (more projects).
Also 10s of billions is still insignificant for any power, transport, or healthcare infrastructure in the scheme of things - we have the money, we just don't tax profit enough. And we don't talk about how the whole budget gets spent (private or public), where all the money actually goes, instead we get the highlighted cases everyone talks about. But not about the shielded industries when they fuck up.
Bullshit. If you can get the same amount of reliable power by just slapping up some solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, then obviously the cost is not insignificant.
That sentence shows that you really aren't thinking about this as a practical means of power generation. I've found that most fission boosters don't so much like actual nuclear power, but the idea of nuclear power. It appeals to a certain kind of nerd who admires it from a physics and engineering perspective. And while it is cool technically, this tends to blind people to the actual cold realities of fission power.
There's also a lot of conspiratorial thinking among the pro-nuclear crowd. They'll blame nuclear's failures on the superstitious fear of the unwashed ignorant masses or the evil machinations of groups like Greenpeace. Then, at the same time, they'll ignore the most bone-headedly obvious cause of nuclear's failure: it's just too fucking expensive.
I'm thinking in practical terms how that still doesn't happen that often, humans allocate assets, humans don't behave logically (behavioural economics).
Nothing ever is going to be perfect and efficient, solar panels might get through vast price volatilities as well, installation costs hand already soared.
So why did we subsidised so much expensive oil infrastructure. And at higher cost of life.
Oil rigs can go into billions of dollars (and thats not even the total cost), nuclear plants tend to have the total running cost up-front (with decommission costs after the planned decades).
Humans don't make economic decisions rationally.
Well if we had no alternative I would agree with you and I would be okay if we had to subsidize nuclear (which isn't emissions free due to the mining and refining of uranium bye the way). But if a country like France, which has a pretty high rate of acceptance regarding nuclear, can't get it to work, who will? Apart from maybe authoritarian countries. Just think about the amount of plants we have to build to create a significant impact, if hardly any plant has been built in a relative short timeframe. I'd say put money in research yeah but focus on renewable, network, storage and efficiency optimization for now.
Right now we probably use more energy to produce antimatter than getting it back
Who gives a fuck about energy density beyond some physics nerds? Unless you're planning on building a flying nuclear-powered airplane, energy density is irrelevant. This is why solar is eating fission's lunch.
Yes, but energy density doesn't matter for most applications and the waste it produces is highly problematic.
"85% of used fuel rods can be recycled" is like "We can totally capture nearly all the carbon from burning fossil fuels and then remove the rest from the atmosphere by other means".
In theory it's correct. In reality it's bullshit that will never happen because it's completely uneconomical and it's just used as an excuse to not use the affordable technology we already have available and keep burning fossil fuels.
They’re saying that plausible uses don’t necessarily translate to real world use, in practice. I have no stake in this, just translating
Capturing all the extra carbon from the atmosphere is not as expensive as it sounds like. It can easily be done by a few rich countries in very few decades once we stop adding more there every day.
Recycling nuclear waste is one of those problems that should be easy but nobody knows what the easy way looks like. It's impossible to tell if some breakthrough will make it viable tomorrow or if people will have to work for 200 years to get to it. But yeah, currently it's best described as "impossible".
What?
For starters, carbon capture takes an insane amount of power. And to follow up: we couldn't even build the facilities is "a few decades" even if we free power and infinite money.
It's a solved problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHHbgIy9jU
Not sure I get what you mean by "slow".
And it's not entirely shocking that we have more of the power source we've been building and less of the one we stopped building.